The Thing About Zombies

September 8, 2016

The thing that people seem to forget with zombies being the current monster du jour, is that, traditionally, zombies are corpses that have been reanimated through magical means.  While the zombie is a fairly new creature to be feared in pop culture, the history of the zombie can be traced back to Haitian rituals, which in turn were brought in from western Africa with the slave trade.  

While similar to the vampire in that it is an undead creature, it generally doesn’t have any sort of intelligence left.  It’s often portrayed as a walking, shambling corpse except in a few more recent films and television programs.  But hey, anything to give a new twist on a genre that’s seeing the limits of their creativity .  

In literature, the zombie can be traced back to the early 1800s while their first on-screen appearance is usually noted as the film, White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi.  But who can forget the Edward D. Wood classic, Plan 9 from Outer Space involved the resurrection of the dead to fight as an army against humanity.  George Romero took the zombie to new heights with Night of the Living Dead, which was a definite nod to Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend.”  Although one could argue that the monsters in Legend were more of the vampire variety than zombie.  Romero brilliantly used zombies as a metaphor for consumerism in Dawn of the Dead in the 1970s and the zombie apocalypse was off and lurching.  

Obviously, I’m going to bring the conversation to the current zombie infatuation and the star. The Walking Dead.  Although, as any TWD fan will point out, it’s really a show about surviving in the apocalypse and what happens when society falls apart.  The zombies are really just the cause and for scare effects as the show’s progressed.  Although, I’m going to probably upset some of the diehard fans of the show when I say that they’ve gotten so much worse at using the zombies effectively on the show.  It’s downright sloppy.  

The most glaring issue for me has been just the smell of death that the show always seems to gloss over.  Let’s face it, no matter how many weeks you’ve gone without a shower, odds are, if there’s a decaying corpse anywhere nearby, you’re going to smell it long before you see it.  Yet, characters on the show seemingly stumble right into a herd as though the zombies were ninjas.  Never saw them coming.  I’m sorry.  No.  

Then the after-lifespan of zombies/walkers are always a bit muddy.  Granted, I haven’t spent a whole lot of time around corpses but, odds are, even if a body has died in the recent past, it’s still going to look pretty normal for the most part.  Except for maybe that gaping bloody hole where the bite occurred.  So why do the recently deceased all have sunken eyes and cheekbones?  How quickly has the body started to decompose that’s caused these features?  And speaking of decomposition…  oh boy!

I know in season one, TWD went to the CDC and got the bible on decomposition being slowed by the disease that caused the zombies in the first place.  BUT, there’s bound to be a point where even natural or unnatural decomposition has occurred and the body will no longer function.  Muscles will eventually atrophy, tendons will decay, skin will rot and even the zombie in the best of shape, will become a meatsicle of goo and bones.  The last season of TWD even broke their own rules with the sewer zombies that popped up.  They were mostly skeleton, no skin or exposed muscle or tendons on their skulls.  Yet, they still managed to get up and attack Maggie and Aaron.  

Is it nitpicky to bring up these points about a show that involves the undead?  Of course.  But a well told story will suspend disbelief.  Once you start taking too many liberties with your own mythology, how can you expect us to continue to follow?