Zombies, zombies everywhere

1. Zombies, zombies everywhere History of the phenomenon

2. What is a zombie? • Brainstorm. You tell me. • A corpse brought back to life by mystical means (Voodoo, witchcraft) or people in a hypnotized state • Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein • I Walked With A Zombie (1943) and The Plague of the Zombies (1966) • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6SWz27OXac • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oynquOmh3SM&feature=related

3. The modern zombie • George A. Romero and The Night of the Living Dead (1968) • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqm-DxSThN4&feature=related • Cannibalism • No exact cause (goodbye, Voodoo) • Return of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, etc.

4. The turn of the century Zombies are more gross, more gruesome and more cannibalistic

5. The turn of the century • Idea of the zombie apocalypse/epidemic • 28 Days Later (2002), Shaun of the Dead (2004), Resident Evil Series (2002-2010), I Am Legend (2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewpYq9rgg3w Zombie comedies • Zombieland (2009) and Planet Terror (2007) • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=071KqJu7WVo • Zombies in other media • Literature – Max Brooks’ World War Z, The Zombie Survival Guide, The Walking Dead comics, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies • Video games – Resident Evil, Left 4 Dead, Plants vs. Zombies, Call of Duty • Television – The Walking Dead (based off comics) • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grWV8WZtAQc • Zombie walks

6. Zombie Walk, Sydney Australia

7. The figures • According to msnbc, the zombie industry is worth more than 5 billion dollars • 11.5 million people watch The Walking Dead • I Am Legend made over $600 million

8. So what’s the big deal? • It’s fairly plausible, not some supernatural thing • Strength in numbers • Constant growth • Fear of contagion/disease • Cannibalistic • Zombies don’t discriminate • Will forget everything about their old lives and will eat the people they loved • Everyone and anyone can be a zombie • Fear of death • You are going to decay and rot. Done. • They were human at some point • No definite cause or purpose • Radiation? Virus? That’s all speculation • Why are they eating people? They’re just, well, hungry… • Smart to a certain extent • They can pick up bricks, shovels, rocks, etc. • Relentless • Won’t stop until they’ve eaten every organ in your body • Won’t die until you injure their head/skull

9. Paraphrasing world war z • I was still lost in my grand, cultural criticism when I knelt to examine my first patient. She was running a high fever, 40 degrees centigrade, and she was shivering violently. Barely coherent, she whimpered slightly when I tried to move her limbs. There was a wound in her right forearm, a bite mark. As I examined it more closely, I realized that it wasn’t from an animal. The bite radius and teeth marks had to come from a small, or possibly young, human being. Although I hypothesized this to be some sort of infection, the actual injury was surprisingly clean. I asked the villagers, again, who had been taking care of these people. Again, they told me, no one. I knew this could not be true. The human mouth is packed with bacteria, even more so than the most unhygienic dog. If no one had cleaned this woman’s wound, why wasn’t it throbbing with infection?

10. Barely coherent, she whimpered slightly when she tried to move her limbs. • Although I hypothesized this to be the source of the infection, the actual injury was surprisingly clean.

11. You remove the heart not long after the victim’s died… maybe even while he’s still alive… they used to do that, you know, remove living organs to ensure their freshness… pack it in ice, put it on a plane for Rio… China used to be the largest exporter of human organs on the world market. Who knows how many infected corneas, infected pituitary glands… [Who knows] how may infected kidneys they pumped into the global market. And that’s just the organs! You want to talk about the “donated” eggs from political prisoners, the sperm, the blood? You think immigration was the only way the infection swept the planet? Not all the initial outbreaks were Chinese nationals. Can you explain all those stories of people suddenly dying of unexplained causes, then reanimating without ever having being bitten? Why did so many outbreaks begin in hospitals? Illegal Chinese immigrants weren’t going to hospitals. Do you know how many thousands of people got illegal organ transplants in those early years leading up to the Great Panic? Even if 10 percent of them were infected, even 1 percent…

12. Can you explain all those stories of people suddenly dying of unexplained causes, then reanimating without ever having been bitten?

13. Yeah, and do you know how long it would have taken to invent one that did? Look how much time and money had been put into cancer research, or AIDS. Do you want to be the man who tells the American people that he’s diverting funds from either one of those for some new disease that most people haven’t even heard of? Look at what we’ve put into research during and after the war, and we still don’t have a cure or a vaccine. We knew Phalanx was a placebo, and we were grateful for it. It calmed people down and let us do our job. • What, you would have rather we told people the truth? That it wasn’t a new strain of rabies but a mysterious uber-plague that reanimated the dead? Can you imagine the panic that would have happened: the protest, the riots the billions in damage to private property? Can you imagine all those wet-pants senators who would have brought the government to a standstill so they could railroad some high profile and ultimately useless “Zombie Protection Act” through Congress? Can you imagine the damage it would have done to that administration’s capital? We’re talking about an election year and a [hard], uphill fight.

14. Do you want to be the man who tells the American people that he’s diverting funds from either one of those for new disease that most people haven’t even heard of? • That it wasn’t a new strain of rabies but a mysterious uber-plague that reanimated the dead?

15. It was about 5’10”, slumped, narrow shoulders with this puffy, wagging belly. It wasn’t wearing a shirt and its mottled gray flesh was all torn and pockmarked. It smelled like the beach, like rotten kelp and saltwater. Aiden jumped up and ran behind me. Tim was out of the chair, standing between us and that thing. In a split second, it was like all the lies fell away. Tim looked frantically around the room for a weapon just as it grabbed him by the shirt. They fell on the carpet, wrestling. He shouted for us to get in the bedroom, for me to get the gun. We were in the hallway when I heard Jenna scream. I ran to hear room, threw open the door. Another one, big, I’d say six and a half feet with giant shoulders and bulging arms. The window was broken and it had Jenna by the hair. She was screaming “Mommymommymommy!”

16. It wasn’t wearing a shirt and its mottled gray flesh was all torn and pockmarked. • Tim looked frantically around the room for a weapon just as it grabbed him by the shirt.

17. I’ve heard it said that the Holocaust had no survivors, that even those who managed to remain technically alive were so irreparably damaged, that their spirit, their soul, the person that they were supposed to be, was gone forever. • I’d like to think that’s not true. But if it is, no one on Earth survived this war. • That was us, standing on the Jersey riverbank, watching the dawn over New York. We’d just got the word, it was VA Day. There was no cheering, no celebration. It just didn’t seem real. Peace? What [did that] mean? I’d been afraid for so long, fighting and killing, and waiting to die, that I guess I just accepted it as normal for the rest of my life. I thought it was a dream, sometimes it still feels like one, remembering that day, that sunrise over the Hero City.