I don't know what sparked me to start writing about such morbid and macabre stuff. Perhaps it's due to me noticing that the approaching Hallowe'en season is becoming as bad as Christmas in terms of ridiculously early marketing of related seasonal goods, and people are playing dress-up already. I noticed a poster advertising a 'Zombie Walk' that was scheduled for September 28th, the rallying point was in one of the local parks. There are more horror stories and gory graphic novels on the shelves and tables at the bookshops. Perhaps it's because these darker, damp-chilled, gloomy days seem to be making the sight of the barricade tape-ensconced, fire-damaged building across the street appear even more ominous and creepy; adding an almost apocalyptic atmosphere in the neighbourhood. Perhaps it was from spending a large part of the day messing around in the kitchen; handling and processing bloody raw dead flesh to create something more utile, convenient, and appetizing*. But most likely though, since it has been so damply cold and gloomy for these first three days of October, it's probably because I've been using my down time at home watching more TV than usual instead of doing more invigorating exercise. The show that I've been hooked into and catching up on is The Walking Dead. It's not the zombies, or the clashes with them, that entertain me. Ultimately, it's thinking of the questions of how resourceful would I be to survive through an apocalypse type disaster involving some sort of serious pandemic that becomes intriguing. I wonder what would I need to sacrifice and abandon, and what I would intentionally seek out and do on my part to re-establish order in a chaotic world.
It's odd because I'm not a usually a viewer of the horror genre of entertainment. Generally, I think it's all cheesy and stupid, thus I'm a party pooper when Hallowe'en rolls around. The sub-genre of zombie fiction may be a growing fascination to me because: I have a role in health care, thus I'm more knowledgeable about communicable disease than the general population, I'm exposed daily in seeing how easy it is for a mind and body to get compromised and subjected to impairment, and I can easily speculate what would happen when a system for tending to emergencies gets overloaded even in a minor degree. I don't believe in zombies per se as the rotting re-animated corpses, as they are portrayed in The Walking Dead. However, I do believe in a potential of a disease capable of mutating itself into the form that infects people as something similar in the movie 28 Days Later as being quite plausible. What makes this type of 'zombie' all the more scarier in the collective consciousness is that, unlike ghosts, vampires and walking corpses, it is the one that can be based in scientific reality and the dynamics (and our under-preparedness) of global epidemics. The victims in 28 Days Later were living people that were rendered and reduced to savagely maniacal and violently aggressive, delirious, non compos mentis beings after a pathogen or virus entered their central nervous system through contact with bodily fluids like blood and saliva. You can give credence to it because we already have a virus like rabies out there that operates the same way. You just have to imagine a more amped up form of it: one that specifically targets and destroys neurological regions for reasoning and inhibition control in the brain's neo-cortex, which as well may cause hyper-stimulation/activation of the motor cortex and amygdala (the brain's centre of anger and emotion) in the paleo-cortex. What if the fight or flight mechanism is compromised, and a contagion does the equivalent of switching it over to 'fight' mode and then snapping off the handle? With the resulting symptoms being: indiscriminate thrashing and biting, undirected somatic hyperactivity, heightened aggression, no sense of self-preservation, no self-control or higher levels of brain function left, you then have yourself something that equates to being a zombie**.
It's even more disturbing for me is to realize just how many seemingly rational people of all ages still believe in ghosts, demons, vampires, or anything else supernatural involving the living dead in body or spirit. When you think about it, whether we are conscious believers in such things or not, most people's lives globally are intertwined with some calendar day, celebration, tradition, or observance devoted to some superstitious belief in the rising/living dead. Even if you don't actively follow such nonsense, it still impacts you: at the very least it gives you an excuse to slack off and party like Hallowe'en does. The world's largest religious denomination has two billion people who are followers in some aspect of a faith centered on Jewish carpenter rising from the dead, yet non-churchgoing people happily accept the statutory holidays, or have to deal with the inconvenience of some shops and services being closed on Good Friday and Easter. A few billion more in Africa and Asia have holidays, customs, and practices that honour and appease spirits and ghosts in some form of animistic or ancestor worship. I couldn't even guess what at what level the impact of superstitious belief, time honored observances, or other memes related and devoted to the 'undead' make economically: in terms of entertainment, festivals, advertising, travel/religious pilgrimages, conventions***; but overall it amounts to something that's ridiculously huge exchanges of goods, time and money. I won't waste more time trying to fathom exactly how huge it is. That is the current and real effect of the walking dead. Even if I had just a penny of every dollar spent by the genuine wackos out there who are seriously planning and prepping for a 'real life' zombie apocalypse, I'd still be a very rich man.
I have to end this by adding that is a shame when we are beginning to find more entertainment watching the fictional dead than we are with dealing with the living in our everyday lives.
* - More specifically, I was making sausages: another culinary experiment..
**- Addendum: actually the person rendered this way with these behaviours could be more accurately termed as a something like a ghoul, or a draugr, like in Viking folklore. Documented cases of traditional Zombie-ism in West Africa and Haiti, involve a witch doctor mixing up a special cocktail of plant and animal based psychoactive drugs and toxins that essentially induce effects ranging from a hypnotic trancelike state to irreversible brain damage. The intent isn't to create a uncontrollable terror, but for the opposite reason: to make a passive mindless docile victim, with no will of his or her own, who can be easily subjected to slavery, or rendered less of a human as an act of vengeance. Canadian ethnobotanist, Wade Davies, explains this process better in his book The Serpent and the Rainbow.
***- For the sake of both fun and games and serious religious ceremony
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