Zombies, a History of Science
Seriously, though, where do zombies come from, as cultural icons?
Much like they invaded so many fictional worlds, zombies have invaded pop culture. Shambling, stumbling, walking or running they are everywhere. In superhero comic-books, in Korean movies, on successful tv shows spawning spin-offs. Still, I always wondered where do zombies really come from? As a figure tends to become mainstream, it becomes less and less evident to ask oneself: where did it originated from? Zombies have become the modern-day dragons, we know they’re here, we take this for granted.
But it’s pretty obvious modern-day zombies do not really look like their predecessors. Contemporary zombies are fast, scary and based on actual science. Take Naughty Dog’s the Last of Us for instance, their zombies are infected by a mushroom named cordyceps, a fungus which usually kills ants or cicadas by first contaminating its host before pushing it towards a point where the parasite know it will able to spread even more.
This trend, this rationalizing of an old idea isn’t very new. Nowadays we try to explain away myths such as vampires or werewolf as mere invention when unknowing ancestors stumbled upon things they could not comprehend. This is our Zeitgeist, explaining everything, anchoring everything to a truth so that it becomes more palpable. As if reality was the scariest thing.
Zombies nowadays run, they are not dead anymore, so much so that some horror fiends prefer to call them infected, as if they were sacred beings which could not evolve. But this popular figure has been changing ever since it was created. We’re just witnessing the last iteration of a myth which spreads at least a century. A modern take which takes its root in Danny Boyle’s 28 days later, from a script by Alex Garland, a movie where zombies first ran, and were not zombies, just mere humans infected with a really strong form of rabies. Science trying to pry open the darkened window of ignorance.
What people usually calls zombies are creature allegedly created by John Russo, writer, and George Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead. In their movie, zombies are corpses brought back to life because of an asteroid or whatever. This small indie film which spawned five sequels had a huge cultural impact; in part because of a typo during the credits which meant the movie could be pirated without being prosecuted but also because of the new creatures it “invented”.
Still, looking at what we now call the classic zombies, a misconception soon appears. Zombies are walking corpses, bent on eating out the brains of the living. At least that’s what people will tell you. You see, in Romero’s franchise — or Russo’s for that matter since he created Return of the Living Dead when he split up with his old pal — zombies don’t particularly eat brains. They pretty much eat anything, they’re sheer strength coming from numbers. Those zombies can’t outrun you, truth is, to modern-day viewers they may not even be able to harm you but once they surround a human being they’ll tear at his fleshand skins and shred it to pieces as if consumption was the sole reason they resurrected in the first place.
It’s no surprise, Romero decided to use his creature to criticize the consumerism of Western civilization as a whole. Zombies are human devoid of human traits, they possess in their large lifeless horde, the silent power which makes us feel useless in front of societal decision we do not agree on, on which we have no power over.
But then the question remains, what of the brains? Searching for a bit, you’d be a bit annoyed to find a movie where zombies solely consume grey matter. It sure exists, but it would not be of any significance. When thinking about green zombies yelling brain with their arms raised à la Frankenstein, you have to turn towards the Simpsons, which in 90, in their very first House Tree of Horror special created a story of brain-consuming zombies. Both the Simpsons earlier success and its impact on the 90s pop culture explain how this myth became so widespread.
Truth is, thinking about it, zombies having to eat brains in order to function is both an absurd concept but still an idea taking roots in actual science; what with the brain being the motor behind our body’s every actions. But this is not the first case of the rationalizing of zombies.
Ever heard of Vance Vanders? In 1939, Vanders was a farmhand who got ill somewhere in 1937. One day he was fine and the other he was sick. The old man lost his appetite and began to shrink away in his bed. Finally, his wife convinced him to let her call a doctor, almost a full year later. Enter Drayghton Doherty, the appointed doctor, who could not for the sake of his patient know what was wrong. Sure, his patient was dying but every examination he made, every test he made Vanders take led nowhere. Finally, maybe because she was in dire fear of losing her husband, the farmhand’s wife admitted to the doctor that Vance had been cursed. He had been hexed by a witch doctor in a cemetery a year or so ago.
Trying to be rational, the doctor really did not think a curse was the reason for all of this, yet there was no other explanation. Soon, Doherty devised a plan. He came to Vanders’ room and told the old man he had found a cure to the hex which had been put upon him, that the liquid he now hold in his hand would lead the old man to vomit the evil which laid in its entrails. The doctor administrated said potion and watched he’s patient began to puke. And was not Vanders surprised when he saw he’d vomited a small lizard. Doherty asserted this was the cause of all the illness, killed the critter and believe it or not but Vanders got well. This is a tale commonly found when discussing the placebo effect, the matter of people’s faith in something over the righteousness of science. To me, it also bore a striking resemblance to how zombies came into our western culture what with it both being linked to voodoo culture.
Henry Vernes, creator of Bob Morane, writes that the first mention of zombies from the voodoo culture appears in Western civilization through W.B. Seabrook’s the Magic Island, published in 1929. In this book, the American author tells the tale of Ti Joseph, a man who dug up corpses and resuscitated them in order to make them work in sugar-cane field. The plans of the witch doctor would have gone smoothly if it wasn’t for some relatives who at some point saw their deceased loved ones working. There after comes a riot and the death of Ti Joseph. Also, according to Vernes while the book first described zombies as corpse aimlessly responding to witch doctors’ orders, it soon plays this explanation down and admits that such things are impossible according to science and that Haitian zombies must be people whom death were faked by the witch doctor BEFORE he administrated them some sort of hallucinogenic which turned them into debilitated human beings. While a colonial state of mind is at play there, we can also witness the first trend of scientific explanation towards the zombie trend.
In 1932, Victor Halperin directed White Zombie, a film starring Bela Lugosi as a Haitian with doctor putting a spell on a beautiful young American. This movie is considered as the first zombie film and it may be no surprise that it did came out two short years after the release of Seabrooks’ book. It is through the Halperin’s flick that zombies gained their posture, their rigidity, their slowness and resistance to harm which will characterize them for at least 70 years but the feature also offers its own explanation for the zombies. They’re under hypnosis, it’s a clenching of his fists that Lugosi uses to make his victims act at his will, a gesture so prominent it was even put on the movie poster.
And maybe this is where the zombie figure first really emerges, the cinematographic zombies at least. Looking at the iconography for people under hypnosis through the twentieth century, anyone will notice the rigidity of the bodies, their lifeless appearance, dead eyes and their resistance to harm.
For the longest of time, I wondered how the zombies were created, what was the link between Haitian folklore and the modern-day zombies but maybe zombies aren’t about legends after all. Maybe they come from science. Maybe they are the cultural representation of something we fear, having gone through the ages, mutating through each form artists wanted to give them.
Still hungry for zombies? Next week we’ll talk Goal of the Dead, the French film in which a soccer team battles vomiting zombies !
If you like this piece, you may like my take on the Three Dark princes of German Horror or A Trail of Lighthouse Movies.
