Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (27 page)

Several months later and fourteen hundred miles away, a second team of archaeologists discovered an ancient Roman mass-grave site in York, England, that dates back to the first century. Eighty skeletons were found showing signs of extremely violent injury and decapitation. Could zombies be to blame?

Though some experts claim this must be a gladiator cemetery, lead investigator Kurt Hunter-Mann cautions against hasty assumptions, explaining that they have no conclusive understanding of what they’ve unearthed:

At present our lead theory is that many of these skeletons are those of Roman gladiators. But the research is continuing and we must therefore keep an open mind.
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Roman amphitheaters are known to have existed in several settlements across England, but no evidence of a gladiator arena has ever been discovered in York, which has forced researchers to fall back on the notion that it must be a graveyard for soldiers. But the high number of decapitations undermines this theory.

If this finding is the end result of an ancient zombie outbreak in England, the battle wounds and headless corpses could be easily explained.

The primitive Jivaro people of the Ecuadorian Amazon are one of many headhunting cultures found throughout history, but what set them apart was their singular practice of carefully collecting each head they removed, then boiling it in a scalding pot of water for up to three weeks.

This process created tiny shrunken heads, an oddity made famous by explorers at the turn of the last century. But even stranger is the Jivaro’s reason for going through such trouble. They claimed their ancestors had faced a great demonic menace many hundreds of years before, and each generation was obligated to continue the practice or risk total tribal extinction.

Is it possible that the tradition dates back to a time of conquest, in which the Jivaro came across a tribe already consumed by some undead plague? Death by decapitation would not work in that case, as detached zombie heads would continue to look around and gnash their teeth, much to the horror of the Jivaro, no doubt.

The extreme ritual of sewing the eyes and mouth shut before boiling the disembodied head would then be a logical step to take when faced with such a bizarre and ungodly enemy as a primitive zombie horde. Furthermore, cooking the brain until it became a worthless pile of mush would no doubt be an effective way to ensure that any remaining life force was removed.

Because the Jivaro were known for their ferocity in battle, they would likely have been able to overcome the zombie threat they faced so long ago. But if they did, in fact, face an undead horde, the fight left a permanent mark on the tribe, as evidenced by the tradition of head shrinking and the dire warning passed on from one generation to the next.

Moving north, we look to one of the most advanced tribes in the early Americas, the Anasazi of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. They thrived for hundreds of years in the fertile red desert canyons, growing their culture and building impressive ancient villages. But at the end of the thirteenth century, the Chaco Canyon people mysteriously and permanently disappeared. Though no universally accepted reason for this sudden decline has been found, recent archaeological discoveries have led to the suggestion that a zombie plague may have been at work.

In 1997, a large quantity of Anasazi human remains were uncovered that showed evidence of death by violent dismemberment and cannibalism. Other excavations of sites from that same area have revealed many more unburied, dismembered, and partially eaten bodies. These findings are particularly disturbing because there is nothing in the Anasazi tradition to explain why a peaceful people would resort to eating other human beings while they were still alive. Furthermore, the possible explanations of war and famine have been largely ruled out by experts.

If cultures as disparate as the ancient Roman Empire and warrior tribes of Ecuador may have experienced their own infestations of the undead, could the mystery at Chaco Canyon be just another reminder of the fragility of civilization in the face of an overpowering zombie threat?

O
n the second weekend of March 2011, the Far West Popular and American Culture Association held its twenty-third annual convention at the Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Presentation topics included the influence of photography in Civil War–era newspapers, the portrayal of homosexuality on cable television, and the rhetorical, linguistic, and political relevance of rapper Lil Wayne. But the star of the event was unquestionably the modern zombie.

In his ninety-minute keynote address, Professor H. Peter Steeves of DePaul University discussed the meaning of zombies in contemporary culture, with references to everything from Freudian theory to Pinocchio. He concluded that not only are zombies a cultural juggernaut, but it’s entirely likely that they will someday replace the human race when natural selection finally passes us over. As Steeves put it:

You may think that this is all rather depressing, and it is. But sometimes the point is not that it is all going to end. Sometimes it’s about
how
it all ends.

At that very moment, actors dressed as rotting zombies invaded the ballroom, stalking the crowd of scholars and academics and attacking a planted audience member who promptly changed into a flesh eater himself. Steeves threw on
a replica of Michael Jackson’s famed red leather jacket, and the zombies joined him onstage for an extended dance routine to the sound of Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Thriller
, released in 1982, is the bestselling album of all time, and the companion video for its title song is arguably the most iconic ever made. It features a voice-over by horror legend Vincent Price and dancing zombies that rise from the grave “to terrorize your neighborhood.” “Thriller” is the only music video preserved in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry as a cultural, historical, and artistic treasure. It’s been decades since Jackson first taught zombies to dance, and they still haven’t stopped.

In 2007, corrections officers at the remote maximum-security Filipino prison in Cebu videotaped 1,500 inmates gyrating in an exact restaging of the famous “Thriller” dance. Posted online, the video has had upwards of 100 million views and was featured in
Time
magazine as one of the most popular viral videos ever.

That same year, Thrill the World was launched as an annual free event in which dancers from across the globe simultaneously perform Jackson’s zombie dance. Today hundreds of different venues in dozens of countries participate, with the numbers growing each year. In 2009, Guinness World Records certified the largest “Thriller” dance to date when nearly 14,000 university students dressed as zombies and lurched around Mexico City’s Plaza de la República.

Despite these massive outbreaks of zombie popular culture and nearly fifty years of cultural relevance and commercial success, the mainstreaming of zombies in recent years has many suggesting that they’re just a fad doomed to fade. Scott Kenemore, bestselling author and zombie expert,
couldn’t disagree more, saying that what some characterize as a current craze is actually just the modern zombie ascending to its appropriate place in our cultural landscape:

Vampires are everywhere. But people forget that
Dracula
was written in 1897. It’s had over 100 years to percolate into our books, movies, and media. Zombies haven’t had as much time to fully seep into the culture, but I think that’s just what we’re seeing right now.

The power of the modern zombie lies in its ability to rise within a population, spreading and infecting new people and leading to eventual domination of the species. Like the dancing hordes that continue to spring up in greater numbers online and across the blogosphere, one zombie invariably leads to two, then ten, then ten thousand. This is key in their dramatic representation onstage, on-screen, and in print and is also a fundamental reason for their popularity at the grassroots level.

Zombies are here, they’re hungry, and they’re not going away—certainly not from popular culture, anyway.

Michael Jackson is arguably the most famous zombie of all time. In his video “Thriller,” a young couple on a date goes to the movie theater to be scared by fictional werewolves. The real horror awaits them outside as the dead rise on their walk home.

Before his death in 2009, Michael Jackson made dozens of wildly popular music videos, but none as iconic as “Thriller.”

ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX GALLEGO

L
egions of fans across the globe believe that there is almost nothing that can’t be made more fun, more frightening, or more socially relevant by adding zombies, and in most cases, they’re right. But what is it about the undead that has so many of us endlessly clamoring for more? Why are they so popular?

Robert Kirkman is the creator of
The Walking Dead
, a long-running graphic novel turned critically acclaimed cable television drama about a ragtag band of survivors struggling to find their way in a zombie-infested world. The series broke ratings records in its first season, making Kirkman an established figure in contemporary zombie culture. I sat down with him to talk shop. Here’s what he had to say about increasing interest in all things zombie in recent years:

People come up to me all the time to say they love the show even though they weren’t zombie fans before. But
The Walking Dead
isn’t about the zombies, it’s about people. It’s about us. It’s about how we respond to crisis. And that’s the case with any good zombie story. So I tell them they actually were zombie fans before; they just didn’t know it yet.

Certainly, the immense popularity of zombies is partly a result of the uncertain times in which we live. Terrorist attacks, economic meltdowns, and environmental calamities dominate the
headlines. New and deadly diseases are evolving at an alarming rate, prompting even the most stoic of experts to warn of potential doom. Disaster seems a foregone conclusion. It’s not a matter of if, but of when and where.

But it’s not just that a zombie pandemic seems to speak to our anxieties about the tragedies and destruction we see in the world around us. Many argue that zombies ring true because they
are
us. They are nothing more than the personification of our own failings come back from the dead to eat us out of existence before we screw things up any more than we have already. Writer and philosopher Ayn Rand famously observed that modern man is an abject zombie on a forced march through a meaningless life, and she may have a point.