As October rushes in, bringing with it colder air and brighter leaves, the scent of something a little more rotten hangs in the air. It’s finally Halloween season, and as always, that means it’s zombie season.
Welcome back to The Modern Monster, a biweekly column published on Freaky Fridays about everything you need to know to survive the next apocalypse — since we were all left behind by the rapture, that’s probably soon, right?
Zombies are one of the most recognizable Halloween symbols by a mile. Jack-o’-lanterns may have first place on-lock, but our rotting, shuffling friends are likely one of the most famous creatures on the Halloween market.
Zombies themselves originate from Africa and Haiti. After African people were forcefully taken to Haiti as a part of the slave trade beginning in the 1500s, African speculations on life after death mixed with Christian and Haitian beliefs to create the religion of Vodou. From Vodou sprang the zombi, a revived corpse forced to do the bidding of its reviver.
When analyzing our modern-day zombie, it’s important to take a look at these Vodou zombis first. Aside from the change in spelling, there’s certainly a connection between zombis and the slave culture they were born from. In the Vodou religion, zombis are compelled to complete the work of their reviver, often forced to do grueling manual labor as an eerie parallel to slavery itself. Not even death is an escape for the zombis.
Over the years, as “zombis” become “zombies,” American pop culture began to turn these sympathetic zombis into the man-eating zombies we know today. That’s certainly a tragedy;, the simple fact that a religious parallel to slavery has become nothing more than a campfire tale in the eyes of America.
All that being said, today’s zombies are nothing like the zombis of the past. While it’s important to keep this history in mind when examining zombies, the two entities have built up different kinds of cultural relevance.
However, an aspect of the American zombie that Haitian zombis do not have themselves is an infection. Nowadays, every zombie is looking to consume a living body, which results in the spreading of a zombie infection.
One of the most well-known zombie movies, “28 Days Later,” is often credited as popularizing the zombie’s infectious nature, although it didn’t invent the concept. The zombie virus of “28 Days Later” is notably passed more like a bodily infection than a bite. The integration of zombie bodily fluids, such as blood or saliva, into a human body is what causes the infection. A bite can do it, but in theory kissing a zombie with tongue would have the same effect.
We see a different sort of zombie virus in the “The Last of Us” games by developer Naughty Dog, as well as in HBO’s television adaptation of the same name. Whatever your thoughts are on the adaptation or the controversial “The Last of Us II,” it’s obvious the series has one of the most inventive zombie sicknesses out there.
The zombies in this franchise are simply called the Infected, with different categories of infection known as Runners, Stalkers, Clickers and Bloaters, all corresponding to a different level of sickness. The infection in “The Last of Us” is fungal in nature, not viral.
A real-world parasitic fungus known as cordyceps is capable of essentially mind-controlling various insects. In “The Last of Us,” cordyceps has mutated its way into humanity, and individuals infected with cordyceps have become, of course, the Infected.
“The Last of Us” uses a new brand of zombie horror in the form of this fungal fear. The fungus expands inside the human body to essentially puppet it around, which raises the question of whether the human brain is still awake enough to comprehend what’s happening to it.
The goal of cordyceps is to spread, and that means finding more human hosts. Disgustingly, fungus pokes out of the mouths of the Infected to reach others, which has led to some particularly disgusting moments in “The Last of Us” television show when these fungus tendrils search the air for victims.
Despite these different approaches to zombie infections, there are plenty of zombies that don’t experience bloodthirsty rage and violence.
There’s been a trend in more recent years where many of the spooky Halloween monsters of the past have become closer to stock archetypes and mascot-like figures. While we still see horrifying depictions of zombies, such as the recent “28 Years Later,” we also see zombies that don’t seem to mean much harm.
The 2013 movie “Warm Bodies” is a prime example of the modern zombie. While the zombies of the movie are dangerous, one zombie named R takes a liking to a living girl named Julie. After Julie finally decides to give him a chance, since R has no interest in eating her, they learn that love and affection for zombies is what brings them back to life. The natural conclusion of the movie is that the living humans begin to revive the zombies.
Another fun aspect of this movie is that while R and his zombie friends do eat brains, it’s not necessarily out of bloodlust. R explains to the viewers that eating brains allows him to experience human memories and briefly feel what it means to be alive. It’s out of a desire for life.
In our current day, zombies have also taken on a greater cultural meaning. Zombies in the media can often be used to represent aspects of life that people are blind to, or the idea that the regular human population is blindly following the arbitrary rules placed around them. They can represent lethargy or blind complacency in daily living.
There’s an argument to be made that we could begin to see an evolution in the world of zombies. Apple TV’s show “Severance” depicts a world where individuals are trapped within regular office life, and if we apply our modern cultural zombie to this show, it’s clear that the “innie” office workers are a form of zombie themselves.
As human reliance on artificial intelligence grows and tensions grow between the general masses and corporate and political elites, it seems we may be needing the zombie more than ever. After all, the most important aspect of the zombie, dating back to its Haitian origin, is that no one wants to be one.