While I'm mostly known for writing science fiction, one of the other hats I wear is that of a horror writer. I love me a good horror film, be it haunted houses, undead armies, crazed slashers or whatever. There's nothing like a damn good scare.
I saw my first X-rated horror film when I was 13—The Sword & The Sorcerer. Let me tell you this, a guy gets his head shoved into a working grindstone and another man de-crucifies himself. It's got quite a decent amount of gore sprinkled over what is essentially a dark fantasy film. Worth a look if you like gory movies, some good demons, dark magic and a frankly amazing triple-bladed sword.
However. That's not what I've got you here to talk about this time. I wanted to discuss zombies.
The undead, shambling, reanimated corpses who frequently hunger for brains.
Most folks should be familiar with the King of zombie films, George Romero. The man who coined the line, "When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth."
That's probably what most people think of when asked to form a mental picture of a zombie.
Originally, zombies came from Haitian voodoo culture, using black magic to reanimate a dead body, although the word can be traced back to West African roots where it meant god or fetish (an object which has supernatural powers). In English, the word zombie (spelt zombi) was first recorded in 1819. We've been curious about them for a damn long time!
So what is wrong with movie zombies?
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To understand their problems, you'll need a minor anatomy course. Don't worry, this will be the anyone can understand it version.
The human body has two seriously vital organs, the heart which pumps blood around the body, and the brain which runs the whole show.
The zombie is a dead body, normally brought back to life by various means. Frequently in modern movies, it's some sort of chemical spill, generally, a military experiment gone wrong.
Now, let's talk about death. A happy subject which will affect us all, one day. Or several times, if you're truly unlucky.
Fun Death Fact: Depeche Mode lead singer Dave Gahan has been legally dead twice!
The two main types of death are:
- Heart failure.
- Brain death, no electrical activity recorded in the brain.
You can come back from your heart stopping. Modern medicine has advanced to the stage where not only can we perform successful heart transplants, the heart is often stopped deliberately during certain operations. Blood is pumped around the body by artificial means. The patient lives, they aren't a zombie though, nor will they develop a hunger for brains.
Sorry to disappoint you.
Brain death is a slightly more vague subject, what with such things as a vegetative state—that's being completely unresponsive, requiring a machine to breathe, being drip-fed. That's not actual brain death, it's quite similar to a deep coma and some patients can recover and come back from even a deep vegetative state. In general, brain death is the end, no coming back, not even if you're Frank Sinatra or Terry Funk.
So zombies then. We're working on the theory this is a dead body, it's been dead for at least a few days or weeks. No blood, the brain has been inactive.
Blood is removed during an autopsy, organs are also removed and examined, and some are replaced. For a human body to keep going, blood needs to flow, the brain needs to control the body.
This is where zombies generally don't work.
Many zombie movies show corpses rising from the grave, walking, and attacking the living. All quite scary images, which is what they are supposed to do.
Muscles decay if they are not used. There's one reason zombies aren't going to walk, along with the fact there's no blood in those bodies to operate the various organs, and even if there was, it'd be coming out of every hole the autopsy created as it's quite unlikely the organs are going to be sewn back together well enough to theoretically work.
That's reason 1 why zombies simply couldn't work. On to reason 2, the brain.
Even if the reanimated corpse was very recently dead and contained blood, it still wouldn't function. The brain is an incredibly complex organ, even now we don't fully understand how it works. One thing we do know, without electrical activity operating it, the damn thing isn't going to function. Merely having a beating heart doesn't mean the body can get up and walk. There are important things like sight, perception, sensation, balance.
All things you take for granted as a living person.
Just to take a single step successfully, the human brain is performing trillions of actions, sending messages across the central nervous system all over the body, to your legs, knees, ankles, feet, toes, as well as the limbs of your upper body to remain balanced. This is why it takes babies a while to learn to walk. Frankly, even if a zombie's brain did work, it would probably have to relearn how to walk again as all those pathways in the brain may well have degraded or gone completely.
If you want to talk about modern fast zombies, those are even easier to derail with two words.
LACTIC ACID.
This is something that builds up in the muscles as you run, from a mild jog to a flat-out sprint, lactic acid always forms when we exercise hard. It's not an issue if you are taking a mild stroll, but if you've ever had sore legs after an incredibly long walk, that was lactic acid build-up. I can talk about this because I used to be a distance runner, I've done marathons, half-marathons, 10k's. I know how sore legs work.
Been there, done that, screwed up my muscles beyond rational belief.
The human body is always going to operate in the same way. Fast sprinting zombies are going to get tired, suffer from lactic acid, and need to stop. Sure, their pain threshold may have changed, but they're going to feel it eventually. You simply can not keep sprinting forever. The body isn't designed that way.
This is the exact reason why you shouldn't be afraid of characters like Michael Myers either, he's a living human man. He feels pain, he gets tired. Or he should, but instead, dumb-ass horror writers have made him out to be some sort of super bad guy who never needs to rest or feels pain.
THIS SIMPLY ISN'T TRUE! Meanwhile, back to zombies!
Movie zombies were just flesh eaters at the start, it seems Romero turned them into brain eaters, as a concept that something inside the brain stopped zombies feeling the pain of death. Which just raises another problem, if the brain is dead, the pain receptors simply wouldn't work. Zombies shouldn't feel anything, especially pain.
There's no real explanation why zombies are solely attracted to people as prey either. You could speculate that's down to the human brain being larger and more complex but you never see zombies attacking chimps, orangutans or gorillas in zoos, whose brains are near identical to ours. Possibly the fact they're strong enough to tear your arms off might be a factor?
We see all those zombies snacking on brains, but no-one ever thinks about what else happens after a body eats. It doesn't use all the material it took in, so that waste has to go somewhere. I'm talking poop and pee, folks. No-one ever addresses those simple concepts. We never see zombies stopping to take a poop or have a pee, but they'd have to, eventually.
Likewise, the body needs to rest properly, to keep the brain working normally. You don't see zombies sleeping, do you?
Zombie films are simply lazy, going for the easy scare, not using any real thought in their horror.
The Resident Evil movies decided they wanted faster zombies, thinking quick meant action. The biggest problem is their director thought over-cranked shots meant fast paced. On the whole, it led to nausea-inducing scenes which also gave some viewers headaches. You didn't exactly have slow zombies in The Evil Dead films, you had rude, sarcastic zombies who fought back. And talked. Not just muttering "Brains!" either.
Romero gave us recently dead zombies, a guy who could smell brains, and speak entire sentences. Zombies who could use radios to call for more live bodies. Heck, he even stepped over the line and dared to show the first zombie baby!
Sadly a large issue George never thought to address, that his zombies create more zombies, decreasing their food supply. Sure, not every zombie creates a new zombie, but for each new addition to the ranks of the undead that's yet another hungry mouth craving brains.
No-one ever takes the time to wonder how many people are buried when they die, sure, it's a lot less these days as cremation is more popular and cheaper now but there are a lot of dead folks just waiting for an army chemical spill to bring them back to life.
Zombie TV shows are even worse, things like The Walking Dead. These folks are supposed to be in an apocalypse but all of them seem happy firing their weapons on automatic without a care where they're going to find more rounds when they run out.
Which seems to be never?
At least on the show iZombie, we had some interesting takes on acquiring another persons personality when eating their brain, that was a fresh new approach on zombies, something actually worth watching. Also zombies having flashbacks after eating a brain, and using that concept to further a plot. It's a clever idea, but we honestly don't understand enough how memory works to make anything like that appear believable.
Fictional zombies are fairly easy to derail when you apply logic and actual science. They simply wouldn't happen.
Now you can sleep better, knowing the undead aren't going to rise and eat your brain as you dream.
Sleep well, friends!
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Ray Daley was born in Coventry and still lives there. He served six years in the RAF as a clerk and spent most of his time in a Hobbit hole in High Wycombe. He is a published poet and has been writing stories since he was ten. His current dream is to eventually finish the Hitchhiker’s Guide fanfic novel he’s been writing since 1986. Tweet him @RayDaleyWriter or check out his web site at https://raymondwriteswrongs.wordpress.com/
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EDIT:- Apparently my terrible memory misinformed me, it was actually writer of Alien, Dan O'Bannon who gave us the brain-eating, brain-smelling, pain-feeling zombies in Return Of The Living Dead.
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