Random Acts of Nerdness: I Want to Suck your Brains

You’re walking along, minding your own business, when some weird guy shuffles slowly towards you. “That’s odd.” you think to yourself, but social conditioning tells you you’re not in harms way, so you just stand there.

Then he drags closer, and you start to get concerned. You shout at him to stay away, but he still pulls himself closer. Something is definitely wrong here. He gets within reaching distance, and that’s when you notice something you should have noticed from thirty feet away, but for some reason could only comprehend it now that he’s nearly breathing down your neck in a literal sense:

This guy looks dead.

And so goes the beginnings of your standard zombie, a genre that’s been celebrated in the US since George Romero unearthed Night of the Living Dead on America in 1968. Before that time, there were very few zombie films that dealt with the living dead concept. Following Romero’s film, dozens of “me too” films sprouted up to fill the demand, a surprising number of them from within the last ten years.

True zombie apocalypse films (the kind where armies of the undead attack a group of survivors throughout the whole thing) spring to mind most often, and they have a nearly-unbreakable formula. It starts out with a viral infection/nuclear waste leak/meteorite crash/magical spell gone out of control; take your pick) that causes one person or a small group of people to turn into flesh-hungry zombies, who in turn devour and/or infect larger groups of people, and so on and so on until you have a city/town/country/world overrun by zombies. Enter a ragtag, ever-growing group of survivors who spend the remainder of the film trying not to be devoured and/or infected as they come to terms with personal problems from before the outbreak and refuse to agree with each other. This results in an ever-thinning group who quickly get over the loss of their loved ones/make a suicidal charge into the group of zombies in a vain attempt to save their loved ones/make a suicidal charge into the group of zombies in a vain attempt to avenge their loved ones who eventually die because of a false sense of closure/ nobly sacrifice themselves for the good of their loved ones/realize the world is covered with zombies and they’re screwed/live happily ever after until some jackass decides to ruin the movie by making forty-two sequels. The End.

There, I just storyboarded an entire movie for you film makers to use. Just circle the multiple choices, add your own random location and characters (you need one main character with a past filled with turmoil to resolve, a really jittery character, and an authoritative jerk who needs to die at some point in a horrible way), some optional sexual elements, preferably with naked boobs (not necessarily involving the zombies) and presto! You have a hit zombie flick! I expect royalties.

Considering the presence of such a formula, it’s a bit surprising Americans love zombie films so much, because we demand new and different experiences that shake up our way of thinking. And if you believe that, THERE’S A ZOMBIE RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!!

Ha, ha! Just kidding, you loser! Okay, so Americans are not the most adventurous bunch these days, demanding a certain conformity to their television, movies, books, and presidential candidates. Yet this hardly explains the appeal of zombie movies. Sure, there are a large number that aren’t appealing at all, but you’ll have that with any genre. Why are zombies more appealing movie fodder than werewolves, swamp creatures, or Barney?

While the harrowing gorefest that is the typical zombie movie seems to be thrilling enough to justify the genre’s popularity, I think there are more psychological forces at work that make zombie films appealing to so many people. The characteristics of zombies as shown in these films create a unique set of circumstances that make people identify and even envy the situation the characters are in.

The key concept here is the ability to immerse oneself in the fantasy. While there certainly isn’t a famine of pre-existing vampire and werewolf concepts lying around, I think people accept zombies as more realistic because they figure, based on the Hollywood science that services as an excuse for having monsters running around, zombies are more likely to exist because they’re simply dead people who don’t know it yet.

Numerous stories have laid out plausible-sounding zombie theories, like the Resident Evil T-virus zombies. If I’m following the sketchy continuity of the science, when someone is infected by the T-virus, they get sicker and sicker. Their flesh feels itchy and they run a high fever until they finally “die” and come back as a zombie. My theory is the itchy skin is their flesh and immune system dying so the virus can take over, and the fever cooks their brains to a point the victim is only capable of basic survival programming, which involves hunting for flesh, allowing the virus to spread to other organisms as a side effect.

The fact I can come up with a plausible-sounding MO for the disease grants evidence to the realistic zombie theory. Or proves I spend too much time thinking about things that don’t matter to a large portion of the population. Screw the large portion of the population. When a zombie comes knocking at my door, I’ll know what to expect.

A while back, people were convinced that a case of zombism was going around Cambodia (check out a sample of the article here). While a part of it was due to the spoof looking like a real news page, despite the fact the article was posted on April first, many people were convinced it was real. The article was originally brought to my attention by a friend who swore it was real. Then again, he believes he’s had encounters with ghosts, so his perceptions may run a little into the fantastical territory.

Even the world’s most powerful religion teaches the presence of an invisible man who had a son that could un-kill people and eventually came back from the grave himself. Yes, people: Jesus created zombies and became one himself. Kind of puts a new twist on things.

The concept of zombies is a lot easier to shallow than other monsters. Werewolves and vampires would require a type of specific evolution, whereas all zombies have to do is die and have their bodies started back up, something people have done on their own with far less flesh-eating results. Ghosts require a belief in ethereal concepts that are usually mocked outside of a mainstream religious context, whereas zombies are simply the shells of people, the bodies we can see and, in the case of those closest to the un-deceased or if they were particularly friendly, touch when they were alive.

Just because something is realistic, however, doesn’t make it exciting, or people would be lining up at a ticket booth to get into public schools, which contain concepts that are as close to reality as zombies. Besides being a somewhat plausible concept, zombies also play on people’s natural fear of death or losing their individuality. Since Romero’s movie, zombies are synonymous with the dead, even if a particular film features zombies who aren’t technically dead, they almost always look like they are. The idea of having something that’s dead come after you further confuses the subject of death, which is something no one is particularly knowledgeable about outside of the basic mechanics.

Zombism is also a common theme in zombie movies. While a few of them feature straight dead people coming back and killing the living, most of them involve some kind of infection, poisoning, or curse that causes normal people to join the zombies. This once played on fears of nuclear war, where a dash of radioactive goo was all it took to make a zombie, but most modern zombie films have moved towards viruses or genetic experimentation to match modern concerns.

Whatever the cause of the zombism, these movies work their horror magic in part because infection almost always happens because the victim wasn’t paying attention or did something stupid that allowed the zombie to get too close and sample their flesh. The more arrogant of viewers will puff out their chest at this and say they would never do something so foolish, touting how well they would survive a zombie encounter without considering the dense fog of chaos they would be immersed in if zombie attacks were a fact of life. All if would take is one miscalculated swing of a melee weapon, too much focus on one zombie while ignoring one lurking behind, or turning a corner in a hurry only to bump right into a flesh eater to do one in. People make foibles like this during their day-to-days by not paying attention, and I don’t see how having the world overrun by zombies is going to suddenly make them Zen masters.

Almost inevitably after getting bitten, the victim is hit with the weight of their eventual fate like a truckload of tombstones. This is a fate perhaps worse than death: the realization that you will lose your personality and individuality and become part of a savage mob. While allusions of social conformity are certainly valid points, my money is on the knowledge of condemnation to a slow, painful transformation into a tortured existence ranks higher on the terror charts than blending into a crowd.

Again, zombies are a powerful reminder of death, and while natural death is often associated with a scary-yet-ultimate peace (unless you’re Fred Phelps), being a zombie looks like a sentence to Hell without making the trip. Those zombies rarely look like a happy bunch. Whereas natural death is the passing of the soul to eternal peace (and only a sicko wouldn’t shoehorn themselves into a better afterlife no matter how undeserving they are), a person who is turned into a zombie seems to have their very essence corrupted and twisted into that of an ignorant, simple demonic creature. Unless you’re Fred Phelps, in which case the change wouldn’t be all that drastic.

Zombie crises, like any crisis, tend to bring out the best and worst in people. There’s usually always a set of heroic characters who put themselves at risk or sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. On the other side of the coin, there exists a couple of selfish jerks who disagree with the hero(es) and decide on doing the opposite, which results in their digestion by a pack of zombies soon after, or their actions end up putting everyone in harm’s way, intentionally or not.

It’s the last part that some people have trouble understanding. In a lot of zombie flicks, there’s the party member who gets infected and knows what’s going to happen to them, yet hides this fact from the rest of the group, putting them at risk when the victim eventually turns. Since they’re doomed anyway, why don’t they just confess this to everybody and stay behind to act as a distraction or take out a few zombies before they become one themselves?

Denial is a big part of it. These characters usually convey a sense that they don’t believe the infection is going to take them. By sticking with the people who are fighting the zombies, they feel they’re safe from becoming one by using some horror movie cognitive dissonance. If they told the rest of the group their little problem, it would break this magic spell and suddenly they would have to come face-to-face with their own mortality, something people aren’t all that thrilled with being forced to do.

Despite all of the heavy emotional turmoil brought to us by nearly every zombie movie ever made, in my experience, horror fans seem to harbor more role playing fantasies about being dropped into a zombie apocalypse over facing off with other monsters, as demonstrated by a sizeable amount of frivolous zombie fiction. This is kind of weird when you consider the penalty for screwing up in a vampire or werewolf movie, assuming you don’t have all of your blood drained or get ripped to shreds, is that you turn into whatever attacked you. It would seem preferable to be a vampire, because you retain your intelligence and get to live forever, or a werewolf, because you get to turn back into yourself at some point, than shambling around as an undead shotgun target, but to each their own.

I think ZARPing (Zombie Action Role Playing, 2008© Pocky Box Productions) is more popular because most of the people who fantasize about it our nerds who wouldn’t survive the first wave of an anemic vampire attack at high noon in July. I come in contact with a lot of nerds who’ve spent too much time playing video games and watching videos with over-the-top heroes who can do impossible things like wield entire semis like swords, and they get it into their heads that since they can throw a couple of play punches with their bony little arms and walk away with a puny adrenaline rush, they’re ready to take down the Archfiend with a mop handle, no problem. In reality, if they were presented with a ten-year-old who wanted nothing more than to beat them up using whatever means necessary, my guess is they wouldn’t walk away from it without needing to stop by the emergency room on the way home, if the condition they were left in would allow this to do them any good.

Subconsciously, I think most people who fantasize about monster encounters know this, so they pick zombies because, lets face it, they’re dead. While they don’t stay dead as easily as normal people, your typical zombie has the intelligence of a cubicle divider and only a little more foot speed. Even though they don’t die when they should and will do anything to eat you, it doesn’t take a lot of brain power to outsmart them, and you usually have some time to think about what to do should you encounter one in an open field. It’s sort of like playing on Easy mode.

What kind of mentally maladjusted miscreant would voluntarily place themselves in a fantasy world of killer zombies, or any deadly monster, instead of a dream world of rainbows and unicorns, or of wanton lust and carnality (or both, which is fine as long as I don’t have to watch)? We can ultimately thank are growing worldwide society that’s connecting everyone together more and more for this. Social alienation is an increasing problem as the fish get more numerous yet fail to grow with the pond. At times, it’s all anyone can do to tap into that dark little part of their minds and live in a fantasy world where they’re a great hero of justice and can make a difference for just a little while. Or all the time, in which case a room with soft walls and extra long sleeved jackets await.

Zombie apocalypse fantasies suddenly turn the tides of the us-verse-them battles that humans vie everyday to create for themselves. Due to the crisis at hand, society’s rules are suddenly cast aside in favor of survival. Taboos like stealing and killing are suddenly validated in the name of self-preservation, freeing that dormant part of human instinct that polite society constantly tries to suppress. In a twisted sense, zombie time is fun time.

A zombie attack also allows the survivors to get revenge on society for restraining them their entire lives. Under the justification that a zombie isn’t human anymore, people who are normally pawns in the game of social chess are now vindicated knights of destruction, lashing out against the zombies in erratic, awkward, and ultimately useless ways until they’re checkmated. Up until then, they can hack away at the mutated symbols of their self-oppression, awarding themselves personal gold stars if they run across the zombified version of someone who tormented them before the apocalypse.

The zombie fantasy allows people to lash out against social order and satisfy a blood lust they kept tucked deep inside them. While many would decry this theory and claim only complete crazies would desire this kind of suspension of communal rules, how many of you pumped yourself up to defeat the competition in a sporting event or cheered on as the opposition in a war got slaughtered? Humans are naturally a warlike race, always looking for something to fight against, whether it be physically or psychologically. The zombie fantasy is just another war fantasy we humans entertain ourselves with.

Of course, you have the occasional turn of events where the zombies can be cured, at which point the characters look at each other with that “oh crap” expression and begin rationalizing that it was either them or the zombies. At this point, real life starts its gears back up again and the survivors are left to deal with consequences they secretly hoped would never be an issue again. The game’s over, and now they have to deal with the damage that spilled out into the real world.

So next time you watch a zombie movie, you’ll think twice about dismissing it as a fledging amateur producer’s attempt at making their mark on filmography’s history by producing an inferior carbon-copy of a concept previously executed by their contemporaries. Actually, in most cases these movies are to be taken at face value. All it took was the creative musings of a writer working on an obscure website for zero pay to inject meaning where there was previously none. Hopefully I haven’t ruined the next undead cinematic masterwork you throw into your DVD player by weighing it down with worth. Yet if you’re a cinematic simpleton like myself who actually watches these doomed voyages, you’ll probably blissfully forget everything I’ve said, just as I have done now. I suppose all I need are some… BRAINS!!!