Zombies...
They are a staple of horror literature and the extended popular cultures which have grown as our own cultures grow, expand, mix and merge. They are found worldwide in a multitude of manifestations. The walking dead, revenants from the grave to torment the world of the living. They shamble mindlessly in slow, stumbling shuffles moaning and groaning. They are mindless things torn from the fears humanity holds for that beyond understanding, that beyond the shine of life. They also apparently, for some reason, have a hankering for a hunk of brain.
Throughout time, zombies have changed in popular imagination. Here at the first fifth of the 21st Century, zombies are pretty standardized. Mention zombies today and the average will turn their thoughts to what is most current, rabid things aggressively seeking some form of nourishment from eating the flesh of the living... though this has always seemed silly to me to a point beyond pointless.
Now the idea of the Dead animated threatening the Living is one as old as myth. How that represents throughout time varies but the basic goal of turning that Living into one of the Dead is pretty common. I don't see hungry Dead walking though throughout history, lusting mindlessly for flesh to chew on. That seems to be a more modern interpretation and though I cannot prove it, I suspect the idea of eating specifically the brains came from put-down humor.
You see, zombies are dead and thus have no functioning brain. Thus if you wanted to say someone was brainless, you'd refer to them as a zombie or say they were as brainless as. Then the thought of something so brainless needing to eat a brain to have one is sure to eventually arrive. I have no proof of this migration to eating brains, but this does seem compatible to the evolution in literature and the silver screen. It's like an idea caught on and from that moment, there we go.
Brains or not, zombies eating is just kinda dumb any way you look at it. I mean, why would they eat? Wouldn't they just kill without needing extra calories to pump through their atrophied arteries? Seriously, what's the mechanics of that?
I know I'm probably going to annoy and perhaps piss off those who are serious aficionados of such media as "The Walking Dead", "World War Z", "Zombieland" and countless others which rely on zombies, but I really don't care. I'm bored with those. Why? Because there really isn't any difference at all, either in portrayal or in origin. Go ahead and tell me I'm wrong and then count their similarities. Look at all the zombie stories that fill anthologies and bookshelves. The modern zombie is a cheap thrill made specifically for high-action, high-body count gore porn and, just like midget-clown-porn, everything gets boring when overdone.
I look back to my earliest impressions of what zombies were before they became the simple caricature they are now. They terrified me, the very thought. Soulless, they were slaves to do the bidding of others... sentinels and servants bound by curse or magic. There was always a supernatural element within those horrid things that would grab you and choke you out to leave you dead on the floor. There was always something outré or beyond the spectrum of the Living, even when animated en masse.
G. Romero's classic film and the series that followed never really explained the cause of the Dead rising. The primary thing was that dead with intact brains rose. I suspect the amplification here of the need for an intact brain might have solidified the need for brains in zombies and for the series and logic therein, it makes perfect sense. Again though, what was the cause and reason for the reanimation? Suspicions are cast by characters throughout but nothing definitive is answered.
What came after though is where it just gets lame. Okay, lots of action and gore, I get it, and the need for lots of body parts to go flying here and there always looks great on the silver screen, but is that all that zombies are now reduced to? I truly hope not. It's not that the thrill in a theater of a hot chase with dire stakes isn't there, it's just that pretty much now is all of them, every single zombie story out there.
Another similarity between all the stories of zombies in the last half century or so also contain a similar element that is really depressing. Those zombies you find in the comics before that sinister code took zombies and vampires from their pages were not of an infection or virus or shift in the earth's rotation or anything else. Usually they were cursed individuals or brought back through sorcery or, well, some form of necromancy or magic. Now days, it's all the same thing. There is a virus, a space spore, an infection that mutates or gets out of a lab and spreads quickly through the populace leaving a wasteland the survivors have to manage. Again, we like high body counts, right?
This is the zombie I hate. Bite and infect, bite and infect... the disease spreads as a weak analogy for ever so many things that are generally shoehorned on to try to make the story something more beyond the gleeful slaughter of the undead. Now that we are living in a pandemic, the root cause of zombification today, the whole virus-formed zombie apocalypse is frighteningly rendered impotent especially as we see just how many people in such an active world of zombies running everywhere would simply look at the carnage and say that it's a government hoax. Nope, this is a dead end for zombies if this is all the potential that is left.
Okay, now that I've set myself up horribly, let me just say that the Dead do walk on the Bajazid. They made their first appearance in "Where Lies Hope" and are central to "I'll Always Be With You, Boys". The Dead, zombies specifically, have now appeared throughout the Tales of the Bajazid. I have a wendigo or a perversion of the same. A zuvembie known as Mama Death haunts my stories. There are all sorts of undead which I have discovered don't live on the Bajazid, but haunt there and each I've tried to make specifically perverted to suit the special characteristics of this place. Of the reanimated, that which one could consider a zombie, there are more than one type up there.. and none devour brains.
The zombie reflected in those two stories spoken of already are typical of what waits in my realm. I shall not describe them for those who read the stories will know. That is the primary found in these stories. In one tale, "Puddle of Mud", I was able to employ another version of the dead, but one clearly also not hungry for brains and distinctly different than the first kind, more in the early 1950's comic book style. Then there is another waiting in the wings, concept developed with the help of my buddy who brought me Lovecraft, but they aren't ready yet and their story will come. I will confess to working with one of them on my current project though, but again, no eating of brains or flesh to fill a stomach that is too rotted to hold food.
I truly do hope the menace invoked by those Dead who shamble within the old mines up on the Bajazid resonates. Dread is my greatest tool with these, the horror they represent as they wait in the shadows. While I know there is little chance of reclaiming zombies ultimately from the video-game targets they have become, I do have a little bit of hope that they will provide a refreshing enough change from the generic virus-zombie with flexible limbs and ever hungry stomachs, at least enough to disturb the sleeping thoughts of those who meet them in these Tales.
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