Halloween Special - Zombies

A possible future?

The shambling undead with an insatiable appetite for braaains, blue-grey corpses coming to life to wreak vengeance on the living, mindless automatons that usually overwhelmingly outnumber small pockets of survivors, these are the setups for your average zombie-flick. The ‘first’ zombie film was George Romero’s 1968 “Night of the Living Dead”, where the shambling un-dead were metaphors for “for homosexual repression, the civil rights movement, feminism, the counterculture, or an unwinnable war in Vietnam” (source)

The zombies have also been made proxies for corporate greed and consumerism
(Resident Evil 1(2002) , Land of the Dead (2005)), class warfare (Day of the Dead (1985)), genetic engineering and worldwide virus pandemics (All the Resident Evils, 28 Days Later (2002) and 28 Weeks Later (2007)), environmental catastrophe (Silent Hill (2006)) and pretty much any other issue you can think of...oh yeah and death.

It is therefore unsurprising that ‘serious’ scientists and professors have begun to use zombies and the zombie apocalypse for theories in their respective disciplines. First up, a research paper published in Infectious Disease Modeling Research Progress (2009) entitled “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modeling of an outbreak of Zombie infection” (available here).

A "zombie" with the "rage virus" (from "28 days later")

Due to the sheer variety of zombies out there, these professors felt it necessary to define the type of zombie they were dealing with:

“The model zombie is of the classical pop-culture zombie: slow moving, cannibalistic and undead. There are other ‘types’ of zombies, characterised by some movies like 28 Days Later [9] and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead [10]. These ‘zombies’ can move faster, are more independent and much smarter than their classical counterparts.”

And what these scientists have inadvertently stumbled on is the great debate amongst zombie-aficionados, the recent evolution of the fast zombie. Quoting the zombie master par excellence, Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead (2004) in a column for The Guardian:

“You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies do not run.”

Back to the research paper, the scientists used the zombies as a model for any virus outbreak, and using the characteristics of zombies (susceptibility, infectiousness, etc...) they came to some pretty grim conclusions for any surviving humans in the event of the zombie apocalypse.

At this point, Professor of International Politics, Donald W. Drezner published an article for Foreign Policy magazine, “Theory of International Politics and Zombies”, who details various political schools of thought and exactly what they would do in the event of a global zombie pandemic.

For example:

“A structural realist would argue that, because of the uneven distribution of capabilities, some governments will be better placed to repulse the zombies than others.”

or that social constructivists

“would posit that the zombie problem is what we make of it. That is to say, there are a number of possible emergent norms in response to zombies.”

The article is funny and well worth the read. And regardless of your own feelings towards the undead, clearly some serious people are giving it some thought.

Happy Halloween!!!!

A vegetarian zombie - most
likely a social constructivist