In the 1930s and 1940s, the screenwriters, producers and directors of movies of the dead—such as King of the Zombies, White Zombie, and I Walked with a Zombie—were near-exclusively inspired by Haitian traditions, by Voodoo beliefs, and by sinister spells and incantations. And, invariably, the zombie presence in old-school Hollywood was focused on one locale, such as an isolated island or a creepy old mansion. Zombie hordes devouring the living, the end of the world, and Armageddon-style, worldwide disaster were nowhere in sight. It was not until 1968, when George A. Romero unleashed a certain movie—Night of the Living Dead—onto the masses that the zombie largely left the domains of Voodoo and magic behind and entered a new, and far more savage, realm. That realm was, and still is, filled with viruses, bites, infection, and worldwide chaos.
There can be no doubt, however, that the rise of the zombies reached—pardon the pun—epidemic proportions in the first years of the twenty-first century—in fact, post-9-11. When the terrible events of September 11, 2001, occurred, and the United States was faced with its worst nightmare since Pearl Harbor, waves of terror, vulnerability, fear, chaos, distrust, and paranoia swept across the land and quickly infected millions. And something else happened. Perhaps provoked by the shock of assuming it was invulnerable to the types of terrorist attacks that had dominated the Middle East for years, and those that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) unleashed on the British Isles in the 1970s and 1980s, whole swathes of American society became caught up in the idea that the end was near.
There were those who believed that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were not simply modern day equivalents of the Vietnam War or the Korean War. Rather, rabid religious extremists loudly proclaimed and screamed this was a Holy War of literal proportions—that is to say, the beginning of the final battle between good and evil, between God and Satan. Armageddon was on the horizon. Even Hollywood was bitten by the apocalyptic bug. Movies like The Day After Tomorrow, Contagion, Knowing, 2012, and The Road make that amply clear.
Television was also caught up in such matters. Life after People, a History Channel series, aired from 2008 to 2009. It told of what the world of the future would be like if the humans were eradicated. The first episode—which aired in January 2008—was the History Channel’s highest-rated show ever. Similarly, since 2012 the National Geographic Channel has broadcast a series titled Doomsday Preppers. Each episode focuses on different, real-life individuals, or families, preparing for what they believe will be the end of society, whether by an irreversible collapse of the U.S. electrical grid, an economic meltdown, a polar-shift, gigantic solar-flares, or numerous other scenarios. It may not come as a surprise, at this point, to learn that Doomsday Preppers is NGC’s most successful series since the channel was launched in 1997. And what about the most-watched, basic-cable series of all time, The Walking Dead? That series has become far less a TV show and far more a global phenomenon. And it’s surely no coincidence that the fascination with zombie-based “end-of-the-world” scenarios has increased as America’s obsession with the “End Times” grows.
This has led to an intriguing, but perhaps inevitable, development. Or, rather, to an intriguing suspicion: there are growing numbers of people who now fully accept that a real-life, zombie-driven Armageddon is on the horizon and getting ever closer. Fingers of the paranoid variety are being pointed at “them,” and at “the government.” Gun-toting loons who live in the woods and sport names like Billy-Bob and Bubba are preparing for the day when they believe the dead really will rise from the grave and overwhelm the rest of us. There is whispered talk of numerous government agencies secretly buying up massive amounts of bullets and guns, all anticipating the day when millions of the living suddenly become the dead, and then, shortly afterwards, turn into the not-quite-so dead, after all. Welcome to the world of the zombie conspiracy-theorists.
Then there are the zombie walks. Definitively social events, they involve thousands of people all agreeing to meet at one particular locale, on a specific time and date, and dressing up to resemble the staggering dead. A good time is had by one and all, living out fantasies of the infected sort. Such is the allure of becoming just about the closest thing to a real zombie as is possible that in October 2012 a stunning 25,000-plus people transformed themselves for a zombie walk in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
What all of this tells us is that the zombie takeover is not just a conspiracy theory, a dream, a nightmare, or a fantasy. It’s already a done deal. In the final episode of season two of The Walking Dead, the lead-character, Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes, famously stated: “We’re all infected.” And we are. We’re not infected with a deadly virus that transforms people into homicidal monsters and that leads to the collapse of society, however. Rather, we’re infected with a fascination for the concept of a deadly virus that transforms people into homicidal monsters and that leads to the collapse of society. And just like the zombie outbreaks of television, movies, graphic novels, video games, and more, the human infection of fascination is growing at what appears to be an unstoppable and incredible rate.
With that all said, it’s now time to take a trip into the A-to-Z world of the dead, the bitten, the reanimated, the monsters of the apocalypse, or, as this type of unholy creature is far better known, the zombie.
A
AIDS
See also: Alien Infection, Alien Virus, Black Death, Creutzfeld-Jacobs Disease, Infection, Spanish Flu
When, in a wholly fictional setting, a zombie outbreak begins, it is usually accompanied by massive amounts of fear and hysteria. In real life, perhaps the closest thing to have ever mirrored that same fictional hysteria and fear came in the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis began. Over-the-top demands, to the effect that the infected should be rounded up and placed in isolation, circulated widely and wildly. Crazed, religious types asserted loudly that AIDS—Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome—was God’s very own, unique way of punishing homosexuals for their “sins.” There was mass confusion—just about everywhere—on how infection could be contained or spread.
These issues and concerns are all remarkably similar to—in fact, almost identical to—those that we have seen in movies, novels, comic-books and television productions of the undead variety. There is another parallel between AIDS and zombies, too: the theory that the virus—whether in reality or in fiction—was created by top secret U.S. government experimentation gone disastrously wrong.
History has shown, however, that with regard to AIDS, the original allegations to this effect surfaced from disinformation spread by experts and psychological-warfare operatives within the heart of the former Soviet Union’s KGB. Background data on the KGB’s involvement in spreading rumors—to the effect that the U.S. government deliberately engineered HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) as a weapon of biological warfare to wipe out significant numbers of the population—were addressed in a 2005 paper prepared by the U.S. Department of State. Titled AIDS as a Biological Weapon, it notes:
“When the AIDS disease was first recognized in the early 1980s, its origins were a mystery. A deadly new disease had suddenly appeared, with no obvious explanation of what had caused it. In such a situation, false rumors and misinformation naturally arose, and Soviet disinformation specialists