Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (6 page)

Unlike zombies, Nachzehrers don’t spread their affliction to others through a bite or fluid transfer. The legends of the Nachzehrers are essentially the German version of the vampire legends of Eastern Europe. Like vampires, Nachzehrers were believed to return from the grave with the specific goal of attacking family members and other friends and acquaintances.

A revenant can be a variety of entities, from something as ethereal as a ghost to the physical presence of the walking corpse. Either way, its mission is to torment the living, but revenants usually have specific targets in mind: people they knew when they were living. As vampire expert Scott Bowen
explains, the revenant is a creature that reflects the conflicts or losses of particular human relationships:

This likely arises out of the psychological trauma caused by the death of a close relative. One of Tolstoy’s two famous vampire stories is about a father returning home to his family from war as a vampire.

Bowen adds that a person who died in dire circumstances, such as from a terrible disease or some violent act, increases the family’s suffering. This grief and trauma ultimately gets expressed as a cultural fear that the victim will rise from the dead.

Revenants prey on humans, but this could mean any range of behaviors from blood drinking or eating flesh to simply causing stress through perpetual haunting. Bowen notes that the term
revenant
occurs often in the context of vampire stories throughout that creature’s long literary history. The two are apparently very closely related.

The Chiang-Shih is a legendary Chinese creature with striking similarities to our modern understanding of the vampire. Much like the Nachzehrer, the Chinese vampire was a human who died violently. Suicides, murder victims, drowning victims, and the hanged were believed to be transformed easily if left unburied.

The Chiang-Shih is nocturnal and very violent, often ripping apart its victims and pulling off their heads and limbs. It also possesses a strong sexual drive and often attacks
women, raping and killing them. Repeated attacks on humans build up the strength of the Chiang-Shih until it is able to shape-shift into a wolf or a flying beast.

Finally, like both the Nachzehrer and the revenant, the Chiang-Shih is a single entity. It doesn’t travel in groups or carry a contagious pathogen that can be passed to its innocent victims.

T
here is no greater testimony to the zombie’s popularity than the spectacular overuse of the word in the last thirty years.
Zombie
has been used to refer to so many different kinds of entities and social dynamics that it is now hard to rein it in with any specificity. By one expert’s account, for example, anyone who has died and been brought back to life is a zombie. This means that people who flatline on the operating table before being revived are doomed to be zombies for the rest of their lives.

Movie critics aren’t any better at using
zombie
responsibly. One critic cited Johnny Depp as starring in the top-grossing zombie movie of all time, 2003’s
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.
The film raked in more than $650 million worldwide and has spawned a number of highly profitable sequels. The only problem is that
Pirates
clearly isn’t a zombie movie, as any five-year-old who’s seen it can tell you. There is not a single creature in it that remotely approximates a zombie in any way, shape, or form. Meaningless generalizations like this would make me want to pull my hair out, if only I had any.

What I like to call beer-goggle zombies are creatures that are not related to the modern zombie, but if you’re really drunk and you can’t fully form a logical train of thought, then you might be tempted to think they are zombies.

Apparently, zombie catalogers drink a lot. Here are some monsters that frequently appear in zombie film catalogs and zombie guides both online and in traditional print publications. A simple litmus test is applied to the creatures below to see how well they conform to the modern zombie’s three-tiered definition.

Litmus Test:

Relentlessly Aggressive

Reanimated Human Corpse

Biological Infection

It is often said that there is a long-standing debate between zombie enthusiasts about whether or not Frankenstein is a zombie. Not really. There’s no debate that I’m aware of, at least not one between two sane people. Mary Shelley’s monster is not a zombie.

Though Dr. Frankenstein uses scientific means to create his creature in Shelley’s novel, he’s not a reanimated corpse. In fact, he’s not a corpse at all but a collection of body parts stolen from different corpses and brought together to form a single new entity. Frankenstein is also not a reanimated corpse in the sense of being undead. He has a heartbeat and is fully alive in the classical sense of being a living creature. He is brought to life rather than reanimated.

Frankenstein is furthermore not relentlessly aggressive. He’s quite a sensitive and thoughtful guy. He even tries to learn how to read and desires, above all, to be loved. He’s driven to anger and destructiveness through his mistreatment by
humans, who discriminate against him largely because of his appearance.

Finally, the process by which he was made to exist does not involve an infection. He has no contagion to spread to others. In fact, he doesn’t have a “condition” at all, except for the tragedy of his loneliness. Later Hollywood versions of Frankenstein make him less sympathetic and more predatory, but his essential problem remains: he just doesn’t fit in with others.

Not a zombie.

Litmus Test:

Relentlessly Aggressive

Reanimated Human Corpse

Biological Infection

Really? This one is pretty clear. It’s even got its own name,
mummy
, illustrating the point that if a monster is actually identified as something else in particular, it’s relatively safe to assume that it’s not a zombie.

For the record, mummies are not zombies because they are not relentlessly aggressive and they do not come to be through a biological infection. A mummy is a corpse whose skin and organs have been preserved by either intentional or incidental exposure to chemicals, extreme coldness, low humidity, or some combination thereof. In ancient mummy lore, they often protect specific places or sacred items, and this is also their driving desire in Hollywood depictions.

Mummies are not revived through some scientific process but, rather, through the fulfillment of a curse or eternal
mission. Once order is restored to the mummy’s world—meaning once you give it back its favorite ruby brooch or leave its sacred space—it will lie down again and wait for the next time someone disturbs its rest.

Mummies may be creepy and cool, but they are not related to zombies in the least.

Litmus Test:

Relentlessly Aggressive

Reanimated Human Corpse

Biological Infection

Like mummies, demons also have their own label, which suggests right away that they’re not zombies. What separates dramatic depictions of demons from those of the modern zombie is that demon aggression is a matter of choice and is often specifically targeted to a limited number of individuals.

Demons are also driven by supernatural possession, not biological infection. A demon enters the body of its choosing, either living or dead, and asserts its will on that body to its own ends. Demonic possession isn’t contagious, although it’s difficult to overcome. But once the evil spirit leaves the possessed body it is returned to its natural state. There’s really nothing here that relates to zombies.

Nevertheless, some filmmakers and critics have tried to tie them together. Sam Raimi’s 1981 romp,
The Evil Dead
, is the classic example of a demonic movie often mistaken to be a zombie movie. In it, demons are accidentally awakened in the woods surrounding an isolated cabin. They set about
tormenting the film’s lead, Bruce Campbell, and picking off his friends one by one.

Though human corpses do stand up, dance about, and attack the living, the demonic force behind their actions also causes trees and plants to come alive; turns slight young women into flying, bug-eyed maniacs with superhuman strength; and makes windows and doors swing about wildly as if the demon is possessing the entire building. When’s the last time you saw a real zombie do that?

Litmus Test:

Relentlessly Aggressive

Reanimated Human Corpse

Biological Infection

OK, according to Christian belief, Jesus did rise from the dead. But by all accounts, he was just as much himself after coming back from the dead as he was before his crucifixion. Zombies, on the other hand, share nothing in common with
the human who once occupied their bodies, except for the physical body itself. Technically speaking, a zombie is not a person raised from the dead but, rather, a new creature animating the shell of what was once a living human being. The former person is gone, and something new has taken his or her place. Also, Jesus ascends to heaven after being resurrected, while zombies aren’t going anywhere. The verdict on Jesus? Not a zombie. Although the biblical prophet Zechariah does seem to prophesy a zombie pandemic, which ought to give us all something to think about:

The Lord will send a plague to all the nations that fought Jerusalem. Their flesh will rot where they stand, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. The people will be stricken by a great panic, and they will attack one another. (14:12–13)

In the meantime, Jesus’s not-zombieness is helpful in illustrating a core quality of zombies: they aren’t the person whose body they occupy. Think of the body as a house and the zombie as a squatter. The rightful owners have moved on, and someone else has taken up residence in what should be an abandoned property. So if you ever have the misfortune of running into a recently deceased family member shambling up your driveway with a hunger for human flesh, don’t hesitate to take swift and violent action. That’s not Uncle Bob anymore; that’s just some freeloader wearing his skin and bones.