Zombie CSU (4 page)

21
ST
-C
ENTURY
Z
OMBIE
M
OJO

The popularity of the genre has waxed and waned, and for a while the unquiet dead seemed to have settled back down for their eternal rest. Vampires became trendy again, and the day of the dead seemed to be over, or at least to have peaked in terms of cinematic potential. In fact, a few years ago if someone told me that a zombie novel would hit the hardback best-seller list and that Brad Pitt would make a movie based on it, I’d have either laughed or thought it was a sign of the apocalypse.

Turns out, however, Brad
is
making a big-budget zombie flick based on the best-selling
World War Z
by Max Brooks (son of Mel). So, yeah, sign of the apocalypse.

Zombies are back…and zombies are
hot
; and even though the “z” word may not have been consistently on everyone’s personal radar, a vast pop culture movement has been out there, growing steadily and growing in all sorts of unexpected directions. Not just in feature films, but in fiction, role-playing and video games, TV, direct-to-video movies, comics, toys, music, and art.

Zombie films have made a huge comeback.
Shaun of the Dead
showed that flesh-eating ghoul movies make good date flicks.
¹²
Dawn of the Dead
was remade with quality actors—Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames—and did very well at the box office. The king of the undead himself, George Romero, has returned to making new undead films like
Land of the Dead
(2005) and
Diary of the Dead
(2008). The video game
Resident Evil
¹³
has been translated successfully into novels and big-budget, highly successful movies. Zombie-esque thrillers like
28 Days Later
and its sequel
28 Weeks Later
have been international hits, winning critical acclaim as well as audience praise. All three of his original films,
Night, Dawn
, and
Day
have been given bigger budget remakes. New zombie flicks are being hustled through development. Zombies have risen from the dead, and this time nothing seems to be knocking them down again.

U
NDERSTANDING THE
Z
OMBIE
T
HREAT

So what makes a good zombie story?

For the most part, the zombie stories in film and fiction follow a basic pattern:

 


Something happens (radiation, plague, etc.) that causes the recently dead to rise.


 


 


The risen dead have little or no intelligence and operate on a kind of reduced sub-animal instinct. This instinct drives them to attack living humans.


 


 


The dead murder humans and consume their flesh.


 


 


In the face of this plague of zombies, civilization quickly crumbles.


 


 


A few remaining humans hole up in a (fill in the blank: deserted farmhouse, shopping mall, underground complex, etc.).


 


 


The humans bicker, and ultimately one or more of them is responsible for the dead breaking in and chomping on the last survivors.


 


 


Often at least one good-looking man and woman escape, but the future of the race as a whole (sex appeal notwithstanding) looks pretty grim.


 


 


Welcome to the zombie apocalypse.


 

But is that how it would actually happen? Let’s revisit what we talked about in the Introduction:

 


If, for whatever reason, the dead did return to a semblance of life and begin attacking the living, would society immediately and irrevocably come apart at the seams?


 


 


Would all the infrastructure fail its citizenry?


 


 


Would medical science be unable to find a cure in time?


 


 


Would the police and military truly be overwhelmed?


 

Personally, I don’t think so. And I
like
apocalyptic fiction.

Having worked at various times in my career with law enforcement, the medical field, and in the sciences, I have a fair amount of faith that the technology, organization, process, and courage of the system would be up to the task.

In
World War Z
, the author takes the middle view on the issue. He holds that the zombies would overwhelm mankind, largely due to the inefficiencies of the global political system and basic human greed and stupidity. However he further postulates that humanity, pushed to the edge of extinction, would find a way to work together and fight its way back from the brink to win the zombie war.

Romero, the godfather of the subculture, takes a far dimmer view. In
Night of the Living Dead
the ghouls are ultimately (it seems) defeated, even though it’s at a dreadfully high cost in human terms; but in his 1978 sequel,
Dawn of the Dead
¹⁵
, he predicts that the plague will continue to spread and more aspects of society will break down. By 1985’s
Day of the Dead
, Romero predicted a total societal collapse. However, when he picked up the series again in 2005 with
Land of the Dead
, he seems to have either softened a bit in his dim view of civilization—because in that more whole cities have survived
¹⁶
—or taken a bigger picture view and granted that not everyone on earth would turn out to be a gutless, backstabbing jackass or a failed hero. In that film both the humans
and
the zombies seem to be evolving to a higher level, though truth be told more of the zombies display admirable qualities (ranging from basic problem solving to genuine remorse for a fallen comrade) than do the humans. A few good guys manage to escape in the end; but few enough to suggest that Romero hasn’t exactly gone all fuzzy-bunny on us. He’s still the ruling monarch of dystopia.