How Zombies Work 189
Tsaroth writes "Just in time for everyone's Halloween fantasy, a horde of undead minions to collect candy for you; HowStuffWorks.com has just put up a new article about How Zombies Work. From Haitian zombies, to Dawn of the Dead it's more fun with corpses than you've ever had, hopefully." Ewww. From the article: "It happens in just about every zombie movie -- a throng of reanimated corpses lumbers toward the farmhouse, shopping mall, pub or army base where the heroes have barricaded themselves. The zombies aren't dead, but they should be. They're relentless and oblivious to pain, and they continue to attack even after losing limbs. Usually, anyone the zombies kill returns as a zombie, so they quickly evolve from a nuisance to a plague."
Fool Proof Zombie Survival Plan (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Problem: supplies. (Score:3, Insightful)
Without having a zombie in a proper lab, it's impossible to say, but I'd expect that there are alot more calories being used than can be accounted for by either the hapless victims they ingest (if they're even being digested) or their own tissue being consumed.
I'd like to say that at some point decomp would be so bad as to render them "dead", or even at least "ineffective" (something born out in the remake with the animated face/head found in the cooler... so there may be some hope), but it's not entirely inconcievable that even a bleached white skeleton with some sinew tissue and nothing else could continue to hobble around. You can't be certain that there's not some supernatural force acting on the joints moving them, and it's not really clear how their own muscles could be the cause of motion.
That the process can fail (leaving twitchers) offers some hope that even if supernatural, that there are at least rules, that it may be understandable to a deeper level than any of the characters of the movie manage. That they can be disabled (killed?) with severe brain trauma is even more interesting, but fails to prove that this is a natural organic phenomenon. There are quite a few mystical beliefs regarding the organ, not the least of which that it is the seat of the human soul... which is either missing in these zombies, or some manner of cancerous that's quite disturbing to contemplate. If the soul leaves when we die, and absence of a soul makes you a corpse, do they have souls? Are they partial souls? If so, how can a partial soul animate a body that a complete soul has to exit? Are they malfunctioning souls that refuse to exit a non-working body? Are they even the original souls, or is it some sort of possession by a demon? If so, why are they so shallow? Are these the equivalent of demon bacteria, incapable of intelligence or consciousness? How does this account for the infectious nature? Linda Blair tossed the guy out of a window, but he doesn't stand back up with his smashed head and start snarling, he's just gone.
Perhaps this is why the non-cheesy movies always avoided trying to explain it.
Re:The urge to see it all washed away (Score:5, Insightful)
If I may go all Tyler Durden on you for a second, I also believe that there are elements of the daily drudgery come into play when people have these fantasies. It's becoming increasingly difficult for us to die, ergo surviving is less of an effort. The instincts of ours that deal with fighting off tigers or getting a fire going so we don't freeze to death lie there helplessly and impotent, and we only experience that half-insane fear, half-fucking orgasmic jolt when we are held at knife-point or similar situations. We're in a comfortable rut of daily life where day-to-day challenges consist mostly of choosing what's for dinner or what Valentine's card to buy our wives. A zombie invasion changes all the rules, flips everything upside down. Suddenly there's a reason for being, suddenly a reason for continuing to exist. Fuck differences in religion, politics and sexuality, we're united in the common cause for stopping these bastards from eating us off the face of the Earth. And when we have finally blasted that last flesh eating motherfucker into a billion pieces, buried our dead and rebuilt our shopping malls, our breakfast will taste better than any other breakfast...
It's also likely that some of the motivation behind such fantasies is rooted in a 'purging' of a percentage of humanity, in the same way that a good war or disease bails some water from the boat of Mother Nature. If you take into account that you have to be quite dumb (or really unlucky) to be killed from a weak, shuffling zombie, then it's hard to deny that some people would wish for this as a Darwinistic chlorination of the gene pool.
Finally, I believe it also plays off of those fantasies that I'm sure everyone has had at some time, where everyone disappears from the face of the Earth, leaving you and perhaps a few friends to go anywhere you want, taking any car you fancy etc - an excuse for total freedom and perhaps anarchy.
I have to admit that, personally, half of me would like to see a Shaun Of The Dead-style zombie apocalypse. The idea of teaming up with my mates and driving to somewhere we can hole ourselves up and fend off some moronic undead with a chainsaw or cricket bat (no gunshops or easily discoverable stashes of firearms over here in Britain) does tickle my fancy somewhat...