Author: Olivia Grace Burbage
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| Cartoon of a zombie |
Zombies. Why are
we all so curious about zombies? More fiction than fact, the zombie is, at its
barest minimum, the living corpse of a human body. But how can it be a living
corpse? If “living” refers to the presence of life and “corpse” refers to
the presence of death, how can the two words come together to describe one
creature? That is exactly the point. Nothing can be both alive and dead –
functioning yet not processing, thinking, or controlling itself – can it?
A zombie is a
flesh eating, supposed to be dead human who acts on to its desire for flesh and
nothing else. It does not think, remember, or rationalize. To kill a zombie,
according to J. Gordon Melton’s The
Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, a sharp blow to the head
should do it (831). That, of course, is not so simple when the zombie is
desperately trying to eat you. They hang out in mobs, which makes destroying
them even more difficult, and as far as their concern over keeping up
appearances – it doesn’t exist. J. Gordon Melton describes them as decomposing
human bodies wearing horrid expressions (831). Their hair isn’t combed, their
clothes are tattered, and their bodies, trying desperately to decompose,
eventually form gaping holes. I ask again, why are we all so curious about
zombies?
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| Map of Haiti |
So where did the
zombie come from? Someone’s overactive imagination, perhaps? Actually, the
zombie was first born out of Haitian voodoo. Before modern science came to the
rescue with its current definition of the death-state – no response, no
breathing, no heart-rate, and no brain activity – many people were buried
alive. Haiti, with its limited technology and medical knowledge, buried many a
live person. So when these allegedly dead humans came back from the dead, the
scare must have been tremendous. During the 1980s, an author named Wade Davis
encountered this first hand when he traveled to Haiti to perform some research
(Hall). He actually met and carried on a conversation with a man who wore a
scar on his face from the nail of his coffin. (Hall) Perhaps it was stories
like this that led to the birth of the zombie.
Maybe, however, it
was the use of a certain drug called tetrodotoxin, discovered in Haiti by
ethnobotanists and anthropologists according to research done by Penn State's James Conroy.
Tetrodotoxin is a “potent neurotoxin,” taken from the puffer fish. This poison
is so deadly that the amount in one fish is enough to kill about thirty people
(Conroy). Haitian witchdoctors used this drug, so zombies may have developed
through its use. The problem with such a drug being the cause of zombification
is that the amount given to a person would have to be so specific that it would
shut down their mental processes, almost to the point of a coma, yet not kill
them. Author of the book The Zombie Movie
Encyclopedia Peter Dendle believes that a few rare times in history this
phenomenon may have happened, but not enough to fear the coming of the zombie
apocalypse (Conroy).
So, if zombies as
we know them are not living bodies returning from a too early burial or the
result of this powerful neurotoxin, what are they? Who can define and describe
a zombie? Because zombies are mostly the result of overactive imaginations,
they are incredibly difficult to define. I may feel confident in my description
of a zombie, but someone else may disagree on nearly every point. But on one
point, most every expert in the field agrees: zombies are fiction. What they
are is not nearly as important as why we let them go to our heads.
Works Cited:Brand, Anton. “#9403566 – Cartoon of a green zombie hand coming out of the earth.”
Cartoon. 123RF. N.p. 12 Oct. 2012. Web. 22 Oct. 2012.
Web. 18 Oct. 2012.
Engdahl, F. William. “The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti.” Map. Global
Fluxguru. Blogger. Web. Friday, Feb. 4 2011. 22 Oct. 2012.
Hall, Carla. “Back From The Realm of The Zombies: Author Wade Davis’ Account Of
His Voodoo Pilgrimages Haiti’s
Zombies.” Washington Post. 7 Feb.
1986: 1+.
Washington
Post (Historical) (ProQuest). Web. 17 Oct. 2012
Melton, J. Gordon. The
Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead. Canton: Visible
Ink Press, 2011. Print.
Links for further research:
ABC Science
Has fascinating research
about actual cases of zombification in Haiti and gives more detail on the
process.
Skeptoid
Also talks about Haitian
zombies but from a more skeptical point of view. It goes into much more detail
about the most widely known case of Haitian zombification
InevitableZombieApoclypse
Offers a workable
definition based on the opinion of the author of what a zombie actually is
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