I understand the attraction/repulsion of the zombie idea. The mystery of death is one of the few universal parts of all the world's cultures. At least in Western cultures, it has become the foundation for a lot of cultural fear, as well... The image we have of the Grim Reaper (skeleton, clad in a black robe, holding a scythe) has been postulated to come from exhumed bodies from the Middle Ages... when people were buried in a shroud, with a sharp farm implement nearby to discourage the corpse from moving around once it's been interred. It appears that long before the voodoo-based idea of "zombie" came into our culture, we were already confused about the line between alive and dead.
This primal fear actually wraps a lot of our biggest worries into a neat package... Not only is it fear of our own mortality, it can be used as a reflection of our fears about many other things: society breaking down, xenophobia, disease, and even poses questions about what it is that ultimately makes us human. But now, I'm thinking past the metaphorical... how would zombies work, actually?
It's been almost fifty years since Night of the Living Dead started to canonize zombie lore, and since then there are a few things we've all come to agree on:
1. Zombies are dead people, resurrected by some means
2. Their only drive is to pursue and eat the living (brains on occasion, but mostly they seem content with whatever they can grab)
3. The only way to stop them is to destroy their brain
(I'm not going to get into the fast/slow zombie argument here, nor am I going to debate about whether you have to be bitten by a zombie to turn into one, versus any manner of non-head-trauma death getting you there. I'm just going with the universally accepted "facts" for starters.)
First of all, are zombies really dead? Let me see... They're up and shuffling around, eating stuff. The brain is still calling the shots -- it has to, or else destroying it wouldn't affect the rest of the body. It sounds to me, on the surface, like they're alive. At least, I'd count any organic being that had all those characteristics as alive.
But the thing we love about zombies is that they're *not* alive like us. They have human mechanics, but with all their humanity stripped away. There are no memories of who they once were, no emotions, the inability to use simple technology (like doors or stairs), no modus operandi other than to shamble around and eat things that are still alive when they come across them. For me, that's really the thing that clinches it that zombies are really dead... they can tell the difference and don't bother eating each other.
The one part of their alive-ness that they do hold onto is that drive to eat. The weird part is, though, that zombies never starve to death -- how could they, right? -- but the basic point is that they don't use energy from what they eat to keep them moving or to repair their dead flesh. Giving them something to eat doesn't seem to benefit them... They don't get stronger, move faster, or hold together any better. It's a prime directive that serves no purpose.
So it seems to be unnecessary for zombies to eat at all. But I think the reason they still do must reside in the same brain that stubbornly refuses to give up the ghost. All that remains, apparently, is the basal ganglia that keeps them mobile... and hungry. The function of this innermost portion of the brain is (in part) to control motion and provide motivation for hunger. It also controls habitual behavior, so that might explain zombie appetite... after all, what's the most basic habit that people engage in? This would also explain why zombies often seem to continue to do what they did in life -- I'm thinking of the mall zombies from the original Dawn of the Dead. So it's entirely plausible that only this portion of the brain works in zombified folks.
But then again... isn't the brain one of the more fragile structures in the human body? I would think that it's one of the first to disintegrate, unless there's something in the "zombie virus" that helps to keep it together.
Then there's the issue of the rest of the body. We don't seem to have a consensus about whether zombies are so haggard and fall-apart-y because that's the state of decay they were in when they were resurrected, or not. On the fifth season of The Walking Dead -- and by this time at least a year of real time has gone by -- the zombies seem to have the physical constitution of butter sculptures, and can be dispatched by a strong hit to the temple (or even a high-pressure fire hose).
For an opposing view, we can look to the granddaddy of long-form zombie lore... The undead in George Romero's "Dead" films (as of the sixth, 2009's Survival of the Dead) look pretty much the same as they did at the beginning of the series. While I'm not sure of the timeline of these films, it seems that many years have gone by, and this would lead me to believe that zombies actually maintain the state they were in at the time they died, and any infirmities they have were either sustained pre-death, or from obliviously stumbling into something in the ensuing time.
But both methods beg the question... how much of the body has to be intact for a zombie to shamble effectively? Most of it, I would guess. Even people who have been bedridden by an illness take some time in physical therapy to build back the muscles they have lost during their inactivity. Consider that most Walking Dead zombies are still ambulatory, and you have to assume that they have enough brain, muscle and bone mass left to balance (since most of them are still ambulatory). That just doesn't sound plausible to me.
If I have to choose, then it seems Romero has it right. This seems to be the only method that cause zombies to not only keep the brain from decaying after death, but the vast majority of the body too.
So, where does that leave us? In order to kick a zombie apocalypse off properly, we need a method of zombiefication that can mostly preserve the body and nervous system , *plus* can run indefinitely without any apparent form of metabolism (and I don't think I'm going out on a limb there... in all these representations, zombies clearly outnumber the living by a vast amount, and it's never been established that one can expire from hunger).
Those are the sticking points, for me: this idea that zombies have the drive to consume but don't gain anything when they do. And the fact that they can run forever. Even with our bodily functions stripped down to a minimum, we'd need at least some kind of caloric input to keep going. The fact that they don't seems to put them entirely outside the realm of the possible. It's conservation of energy... you simply can't have organic perpetual motion machines staggering around.
So, barring supernatural influence of some kind, it looks like the zombie apocalypse won't be happening anytime soon. And if one appears to be starting, it can't last for long. Give it a month or so, and it should blow over. Start your stockpiling now, friends...
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