Zombie CSU (35 page)

Know Your Zombies
by Robert Sacchetto

“I did this instructional poster for fun, around last Halloween. It was just after I finished a commission piece for a client who wanted a regular portrait of his two small kids. I think that there was some time overlap…I guess my brain was in a weird place at that point and I thought, ‘Why not make this fun and combine the two?’ and there it was!”

J
UST THE
F
ACTS

Zombies and the Human Psyche

One thing you have to admire about zombies is their dedication to purpose. They want to eat you and they will continue to try and do so without distraction or any alteration of intent until they either get their victim, are irrevocably prevented (by, say, a bullet to the head), or until they decompose to the point where they are no longer capable of accomplishing their goal. They don’t require rest, they don’t succumb to frustration, they never lose interest. Theirs is a task assigned on the deepest primal level, and they will set about it indefinitely.

In the genre stories this compulsion is the source of frequent speculation, but no clear answer is ever uncovered. Having risen, why do they attack humans?

And, do they attack only humans?

In
Night of the Living Dead
one of the ghouls is seen eating an insect, suggesting that they feed on any living thing. In the
Dawn of the Dead
remake, however, the zombies clearly have no appetite for anything except human flesh, eschewing to chew on a dog, which then runs unharmed through a crowd of hundreds of them.

This is one of the elements that is never fully resolved, probably because as a plot point it brings up more issues than it would solve. Here are some of the points to consider:

 


Are zombies omnivorous or just carnivorous?


 


 


If merely carnivorous, will they eat any living thing?


 

 


–Romero establishes that they eat (at least) humans and insects.


 


 


–It has been speculated that it is warm living flesh that attracts the zombies’ appetites, but then how do you explain the zombie who eats the insect? Insects, though certainly possessing body heat, do not possess very much of it.


 


 


–Heat alone can’t be the lure or else they would continue to feed on the recently dead, and all the movies suggest that the zombies eventually stop feasting on a corpse after it begins to cool (else there would be no new zombies left intact to rise). It takes hours for a body to cool to room temperature.


 


 


–If zombies are attracted to warm flesh, then they should logically be compelled to feast longer on victims in warmer climates and less so on victims in cooler climates.


 

 


If these arguments successfully deflate the belief that it is warm human flesh that the zombies crave, then what is their true desire? Is it, perhaps, some kind of energy? Perhaps
ch’i
, the intrinsic vital energy believed by many to flow through the body along pathways called meridians? If so, how does the zombie feed on the
ch’i
?


 

 


–Does feeding on ch’i mean that they are actually some kind of psychic vampire or perhaps essential vampires? (See “Fearsome Folklore: Essential Vampires.”)


 

 


If they are not essential vampires, then what is it about humans that causes the zombies to fixate? In nature all things have an explanation, even if we do not currently understand it.


 


 


If, on the other hand, zombies will attack any living thing (human or otherwise) can their infection be passed on?


 

There are endless ways to spin the zombie’s predator compulsion. But there are other psychological issues at hand, such as how humans would bear the knowledge that the dead were rising, that death had been more or less repealed in the ugliest possible way; that our buried loved ones may be rising from the dead (if you go with that version of the mythology rather than the virus); that we might have to confront a zombie who was formerly a loved one, a neighbor, or a friend and shoot them; and so on.

But is there a way to crawl inside the zombie’s head and understand what makes it tick?