The Dawn of the Walking Dead from the Night of the Living….Whew!
Zombies…..we all fear zombies. The apocalyptic tales of a world gone completely mad with the dead coming back to life to feed on the living has become a cultural phenomenon since its inception back in the late 1960’s with George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead.
The concept of zombies actually has a much older origin. Dating back to the religions in West Africa, the idea that bringing a person back to life with a spell was well known. The person making the spell was called a bokor. The person being brought back was then under the control of the bokor because the person had no more self will. These traditions and practices were then brought over later to the Caribbean Islands like Haiti and practiced in both Hatian and Creole communities under the voodoo religions. A certain kind of powder was known to put human beings into an almost coma like state that simulated death. They would then be buried alive and when the chemical wore off it just would not be a good situation to be in. This would break the will of the buried to the point that when they were finally taken out, their wills were completely subjugated to the bokor. The psychological trauma these people go through leads them to believe they’re actually dead. This practice was portrayed in the 1988 film Serpent And The Rainbow, based on true events and the findings of Wade Davis, an ethnobotanist from Harvard University.
This kind of practice is a far cry from the zombies we are familiar with in movies and television. The concept of the flesh eating zombie coming back from the dead and killing the living is something that George A. Romero made popular in his low budget 1968 film Night Of The Living Dead. The craziest thing about these films is the mystery as to what had caused the dead to reanimate. We’ve heard different things from a virus to a biological agent that came down from space on a satellite that crashed somewhere. These are causes I can for one buy in the grand scheme of a zombie apocalypse, but the idea that such a thing can happen does not fall that far from reality.
Just last year, some guy who was strung out on some kind of drug was found naked near a highway in Florida literally eating away at the face of an unconscious person. The effects of this drug to induce that kind of craziness goes beyond my reasoning as a person, but the term “zombie” was thrown around a lot in this story. Yet it’s still not a real zombie. For one the guy wasn’t dead. He was just strung out on something. To be a zombie you have to have died. When you come back, there’s no more “you”. It’s just a corpse operating on just the brain stem while the rest of your body is gone. I enjoyed Dr. Jenner’s description of what happens to an infected person in the first season of The Walking Dead. I like that kind of thing. Give me the science about what it happening so as to make what is happening more believable based on our views of reality.
Here’s some other food for thought. Have you ever wondered why the concept of the zombie is horrifying? It’s simple yet it points to something deeper. I’m of the thought that another thing that we human beings take very seriously is death. (When was the last time you saw a group of hamsters burying their mother hamster?) We all fear it. We try to ignore it as the elephant in the room. Nobody wants to die. Even in a suicidal person there is still a wanting of survival. We’re survivalists by nature. We just don’t want to live. We want to live forever.
Death is a monster in and of itself. Ask a Holocaust survivor if its not. Ask those who have lost loved ones in an accident or disease. We handle death as if it is NOT natural, even though it supposedly is. We don’t accept it. We choose not go silently into that “deep dark night”. We fight it. A zombie is a walking dead person. When you’re walking, you’re supposed to be alive. When you’re dead there is nothing there to animate what was. It’s just rotting tissue, going back to the elements. The closest thing to seeing people in a living death kind of state are drug addicts in the streets. You know what I mean.
We want to survive. That’s the common theme in all of these films and TV shows. We are fighting against the inevitable. In The Walking Dead, it was discovered that whatever this thing is that is making people into zombies….they all have it. Even if you die by natural means you will come back. You don’t have to get bit in this world. It is crazy to think that it’s not a matter of if but when. We tune in every Sunday night on AMC to see what our beloved group is going to do in the next wave of threats from the walkers and from other humans who are just straight up evil. We do this because we want survivors. We want to see if there is an end to the apocalypse. Is there hope? Is it all in vain? In Dawn of the Dead, our heroes were cooped up in a shopping mall for weeks if not months. Yet still the dead get in. It’s all symbolism. No matter what you try to do, Death will always find you.
I know….it’s depressing. Like I said no one wants to think about the end. Our instincts are to fight it or run away to continue to live. It even raises the great questions to age old mysteries: What is death? What is life? Is there anything after we die? We can keep trying to find the answers, but in the mean time we can enjoy the zombie holocaust on the screen. You can bet your life on that.
The concept of zombies actually has a much older origin. Dating back to the religions in West Africa, the idea that bringing a person back to life with a spell was well known. The person making the spell was called a bokor. The person being brought back was then under the control of the bokor because the person had no more self will. These traditions and practices were then brought over later to the Caribbean Islands like Haiti and practiced in both Hatian and Creole communities under the voodoo religions. A certain kind of powder was known to put human beings into an almost coma like state that simulated death. They would then be buried alive and when the chemical wore off it just would not be a good situation to be in. This would break the will of the buried to the point that when they were finally taken out, their wills were completely subjugated to the bokor. The psychological trauma these people go through leads them to believe they’re actually dead. This practice was portrayed in the 1988 film Serpent And The Rainbow, based on true events and the findings of Wade Davis, an ethnobotanist from Harvard University.
This kind of practice is a far cry from the zombies we are familiar with in movies and television. The concept of the flesh eating zombie coming back from the dead and killing the living is something that George A. Romero made popular in his low budget 1968 film Night Of The Living Dead. The craziest thing about these films is the mystery as to what had caused the dead to reanimate. We’ve heard different things from a virus to a biological agent that came down from space on a satellite that crashed somewhere. These are causes I can for one buy in the grand scheme of a zombie apocalypse, but the idea that such a thing can happen does not fall that far from reality.
Just last year, some guy who was strung out on some kind of drug was found naked near a highway in Florida literally eating away at the face of an unconscious person. The effects of this drug to induce that kind of craziness goes beyond my reasoning as a person, but the term “zombie” was thrown around a lot in this story. Yet it’s still not a real zombie. For one the guy wasn’t dead. He was just strung out on something. To be a zombie you have to have died. When you come back, there’s no more “you”. It’s just a corpse operating on just the brain stem while the rest of your body is gone. I enjoyed Dr. Jenner’s description of what happens to an infected person in the first season of The Walking Dead. I like that kind of thing. Give me the science about what it happening so as to make what is happening more believable based on our views of reality.
Here’s some other food for thought. Have you ever wondered why the concept of the zombie is horrifying? It’s simple yet it points to something deeper. I’m of the thought that another thing that we human beings take very seriously is death. (When was the last time you saw a group of hamsters burying their mother hamster?) We all fear it. We try to ignore it as the elephant in the room. Nobody wants to die. Even in a suicidal person there is still a wanting of survival. We’re survivalists by nature. We just don’t want to live. We want to live forever.
Death is a monster in and of itself. Ask a Holocaust survivor if its not. Ask those who have lost loved ones in an accident or disease. We handle death as if it is NOT natural, even though it supposedly is. We don’t accept it. We choose not go silently into that “deep dark night”. We fight it. A zombie is a walking dead person. When you’re walking, you’re supposed to be alive. When you’re dead there is nothing there to animate what was. It’s just rotting tissue, going back to the elements. The closest thing to seeing people in a living death kind of state are drug addicts in the streets. You know what I mean.
We want to survive. That’s the common theme in all of these films and TV shows. We are fighting against the inevitable. In The Walking Dead, it was discovered that whatever this thing is that is making people into zombies….they all have it. Even if you die by natural means you will come back. You don’t have to get bit in this world. It is crazy to think that it’s not a matter of if but when. We tune in every Sunday night on AMC to see what our beloved group is going to do in the next wave of threats from the walkers and from other humans who are just straight up evil. We do this because we want survivors. We want to see if there is an end to the apocalypse. Is there hope? Is it all in vain? In Dawn of the Dead, our heroes were cooped up in a shopping mall for weeks if not months. Yet still the dead get in. It’s all symbolism. No matter what you try to do, Death will always find you.
I know….it’s depressing. Like I said no one wants to think about the end. Our instincts are to fight it or run away to continue to live. It even raises the great questions to age old mysteries: What is death? What is life? Is there anything after we die? We can keep trying to find the answers, but in the mean time we can enjoy the zombie holocaust on the screen. You can bet your life on that.
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