Zombie CSU (2 page)
S
o what if zombies existed? What if the very first zombie who rose from the dead killed someone? How would the police react? Would they be able to understand the nature of the crime…and the nature of the assailant? Would forensic evidence collection and medical science be able to discover the cause of the zombie plague? And, most important of all, would we be able to stop the wave of killing before a zombie apocalypse occurred?
In order to give us a framework on which we can build our case, we need to decide which kind of zombie attack is in question. The flesh-eating ghouls as shown in the majority of zombie films, and particularly in those of George A. Romero, will be our target. These are creatures that have been reanimated by some process currently unknown. In the Romero films there is an early theory that radiation from a returning space probe caused the rising. We’ll be discussing the likelihood of that, and also explore other theories that have been floated in zombie stories, particularly the idea of a virus. There are more zombie films and books with that as a basis than any other, and we’ll delve deep into the sciences of infectious disease and epidemiology. Since we’re in the realm of hard science here, we’re not only going to look at how collected evidence may help police track down the zombie and the source of the infection; we’ll also explore whether medical science can support the concept of a corpse that rises from the dead and attacks the living.
To explore the forensics of the living dead, we’ll construct a mock crime scene, taking it from the 911 call all the way to the attempt to apprehend the perpetrator. When you take a big picture view of a ghoul attacking and killing a person, you are really looking at a standard murder scene. There will be an incident, possibly witnesses to the event; police will respond in a certain way, following specific established and effective procedures; the scene will be secured and observed; evidence will be collected and processed; investigatory leads will be followed. Whether the perpetrator is Joe Ordinary, Jack the Ripper, or Bub the Zombie, a murder scene is a murder scene.
So let’s take it step by step.
Images of the Living Dead
by Jacob Parmentier.
“The first Zombie movie I ever saw was
Night of the Living Dead
and it was the original as well. I remember having dreams night after night of fighting off brain-sucking zombies for days afterward; but I think my true favorite of all the zombie movies would have to be
The Evil Dead
. I had a friend that had a VHS copy of this movie and I remember how taboo it was to have watched it.”
T
here’s an old adage popular among big-game hunters that goes: “Before you can hunt anything you have to understand it.”
That logic is so fundamental that it applies equally to wild animals, human enemies, or monsters from the grave.
Another variation on that thought is this one, roughly translated
1
from the Hmong language of the Laotian mountain people, which observes: “If I know it then I can hunt it; if I do not know it then it can hunt me.”
So what are we talking about when we use the word
zombie
? What kind of monster are we hunting?
A G
HOUL BY
A
NY
O
THER
N
AME
…
Zombie
. The very word conjures disturbing images. Close your eyes and picture the living dead. You can see their pale, decaying faces; their vacant eyes sunk into dark pits; their slack and expressionless mouths. If you listen real hard, you can just about hear the slow, scuffling steps of a zombie as it shambles out of the shadows, tottering unsteadily as it approaches. You can hear the low moan that tells of a hunger so deep that it can never be satisfied. Take a whiff—that’s the smell of rotting flesh, the sickly sweet perfume of the open tomb.
But what are they? Historically
zombie
has meant different things to different people. To just about anyone born in the mid-to-early twentieth century (and yes, a lot of you are reading this, too), a zombie is a shambling living-dead person associated somehow—and you may not know
exactly
how—with the Haitian religion of voodoo. Those zombies are actually a real-world phenomenon…but are they the creatures we see in horror movies?
For an answer to that question, I asked one of the world’s great experts on the subject, Dr. Wade Davis, an ethnobotanist and author of a dozen books, including
The Serpent and the Rainbow
2
and
Passage of Darkness
. “Hollywood, and indeed much of the popular and political culture, has maintained a racist view of Haitian culture, vodoun,
3
and zombies. American culture was demonstrably uncomfortable with the existence of Haiti—a nation whose slaves revolted and overthrew the white slave masters. The views of Haitian culture, whether written, spoken or filmed painted a picture totally at odds with the people and their beliefs. This propagandized view denigrates an entire religion.”
So then, what is a zombie?
“The zombie, by Haitian belief,” Dr. Davis explains, “is an individual who has lost their soul and been cast into purgatory. By that view the act of making a zombie is a magical act. The victims have lost their animus—their true personality—and their conscious control. In my books,
Serpent and the Rainbow
, and, more specifically,
Passage of Darkness
, I discuss how this is accomplished partly through what’s called ‘zombie powder,’ a concoction made from toad skin and the chemical tetrodotoxin,
4
which is harvested from a species of puffer fish, which is the same order of fish as the Japanese
fugu
fish. The tetrodotoxin blocks sodium channels and lowers metabolic rates. A zombie of the vodoun kind is created in part by zombie powder and partly by the structure of the culture. Believing that becoming a zombie is possible helps to make it possible. It has a clear chemical base, but the creation of a zombie is a social event with spiritual, political, sociological basis.”
Are these zombies the same thing as the creatures that appear in modern horror films and in best-selling books like
World War Z
5
by Max Brooks?
Art of the Dead—Brian Orlowski
Drawn of the Dead
“Zombies have always scared me, much more than monsters or psychos or ghosts. Mainly because they start out as us. I think we are actually looking at our own reflection when faced with the undead. Your neighbors, family, spouse, they can all turn on you when you let your guard down and bad things happen. They are also so terrifying because they easily outnumber us. Whether it is the classic slow-moving corpse or the running, crazed ghoul, as quickly as you dispatch of one or two, ten more fall in to replace it. It’s the fear of a losing struggle, like fighting against quicksand. And the disease spreads from corpse to corpse, multiplying exponentially, until the Earth is rampant with the undead and we, as humans, have lost the fight. That is scary.
“However my art is predominantly humorous cartoons. So I use gore and violence for laughs. Whether it be
queasy
gross-outs or shock value gags, the reactions I get most are; ‘funny,’ ‘cool,’ ‘gross,’ and ‘you’re sick.’ And, yes, there’s social commentary built in as well.”
Dr. Davis is emphatic on this point. “No! The zombies in movies like
Night of the Living Dead
have no connection at all to the zombies of Haiti. It is not a correct or fair use of that word. Haitian zombies are not ghouls.”
Fair enough, but the word
zombie
is associated with another cultural phenomenon—and one that has had a massive global impact. Unlike the creatures of Haiti, the zombies known to the general population are, in point of fact, flesh-eating ghouls. They are the recent dead, returned to a semblance of life, and their only apparent point for existing is to attack humans for food. They hunt and kill, hunt and kill, without rest, without sleep, without thought. And though it’s hard to admire savage cannibalism, one has to respect the degree of focus involved—it makes a person with OCD look fickle by comparison.
Technically our monster is a kind of ghoul…but even then we’re not being totally PC because
ghoul
also has an older and far different cultural connection related to desert demons variously known as the
ghul
and
algul
from pre-and-post Islam Arabic legend. Even here, though, the folkloric monsters had a number of different qualities that included intelligence (at times), cunning, and the ability to shape-shift.
6
However, the Anglicized word
ghoul
has taken on a somewhat different and very specific meaning in Western culture: that of a dead creature that has risen from the grave to feast on human flesh. The movie version of this monster archetype—at least as defined in the earliest films of the genre—has no intelligence, no cunning at all, no ability to change shape, no qualities of any kind except an insatiable hunger and zero detectable brain function.
7
The zombies in our pop-culture sensibility are actually mindless flesh-eating ghouls.
Zombie culture, as we know it today, really began in 1968 when George A. Romero, a young Pittsburgh industrial filmmaker, decided he was tired of doing the corporate stuff and wanted to try his hand at making a new kind of horror movie. His inspiration came neither from Haitian culture or Arab folklore, but drew instead on the neo-folklore of modern pop culture.
Mind you, these creatures weren’t actually
called
zombies until ten years after the whole “zombie craze” got started. That name became associated with it only after the sequel,
Dawn of the Dead
(1978), was released in the United States, and was then recut for European release by producer Dario Argento. He called it
Zombi
. Even then, the word is used very briefly in
Dawn of the Dead
(by the character Peter, played by an imposing Ken Foree), but it clearly wasn’t intended as a defining label at that point. With the European release the name stuck and here we are talking about
zombies
in the twenty-first century. And though this is on a par with calling all tissues Kleenex or all copiers Xerox it is the name that’s now hardwired into the consciousness of the mass popular culture. Zombie it became, and zombie, for good or ill, it will probably always be, I say this with genuine apologies to the people of Haiti and with respect to their cultural beliefs.
Besides, zombie is a handy, short, easily spelled, easy-to-remember label. After all, calling them
reanimated flesh-eating corpses
is a bit unwieldy.
Z
OMBIE
R
OOTS
There are several classic movie genres and subgenres that have clearly influenced Romero’s work, but for the fabric of it, the material substance on which created what would become his own genre, he looked away from film and into fiction. He looked at Richard Matheson’s groundbreaking novel,
I Am Legend
, in which the author blended the vampire and science fiction genres into a single story that used science to ratchet up the fright.
Matheson’s story tells of a plague (
bacillus vampiri
) that sweeps the earth and turns everyone into vampires except one man. The book then explores the protagonist’s struggle to survive against an overwhelming army of the walking dead.
I Am Legend
, though a short novel by today’s standards, is dense with implied social and political commentary as well as insightful psychological subtext. This is a thinking person’s horror story, and arguably one of the most important books in the twentieth-century cannon of both science fiction and horror.
Art of the Dead—Mark McLaughlin
Advanced Decay
“Why did they come back to life? Who knows! A person can come up with any number of reasons—horrific, fantastical or science-fictional. Their flexible nature appeals to me, and so I use them in my artwork, and my fiction, too.”