Zombie CSU (65 page)

D
ELIBERATELY
R
EANIMATED
D
EAD

Authors and filmmakers have been kicking this concept around for a long time, and there are some zombie experts who consider
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley, published in 1918, to be the very first entry in this subgenre. There’s some weight to the argument since it does involve the dead being brought back to life and, once revived, demonstrates decidedly hostile tendencies. In H. P. Lovecraft’s 1922 short story “Herbert West—Reanimator”
¹
a scientist’s attempts to create a reagent that will restore life to the dead back-fires resulting in reanimated but mindless and aggressive corpses who bear a striking resemblance to the flesh-eating ghouls of Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead
. Director Stuart Gordon filmed this as
Re-Animator
in 1985 based on a script he cowrote with Dennis Paoli and William Norris, and in this landmark film the zombie element was played up, both for laughs and for real shocks. These creatures are typically very strong, uncontrollably violent, but they can be destroyed.

 


Potential for Global Pandemic: Only moderate.


 


 


Limits to Disease Spread: The dead are reanimated during a scientific process (electrochemistry in
Frankenstein
; injections of a reagent in
Re-Animator
; etc.), which means that any spread would be very slow unless a more efficient process was developed.


 


 


Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: Once the threat is known, then any armed response would likely end things pretty quickly.


 


 


Likelihood That We’re All Toast:
Slim to none
.


 

D
EMON
Z
OMBIES

Movies like Sam Raimi’s
Evil Dead
series and books like Brian Keene’s
The Rising
and
City of the Dead
use demonic forces as the reason the dead rise. The demons of
Evil Dead
possess dead (and sometimes living) bodies and turn them into raging, blood-thirsty killing machines that can only be stopped by cutting them into harmless pieces. In the Keene novels, the demons inhabit all dead things, including insects and animals. Destroying the body of one does little since the demonic force can just switch to another host.

 


Potential for Global Pandemic: Absolute.


 


 


Limits to Disease Spread: None.


 


 


Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: Not a chance.


 


 


Likelihood That We’re All Toast: Prepare to meet thy maker.


 

R
EVENGE
Z
OMBIES

These are stories of the dead returning to life in order to redress some wrong or to resolve some unfinished business. The water-logged zombies of
Creepshow
have come back for revenge; as is the sort-of-a-cyborg zombie in
Deadly Friend
. In the
Blind Dead
series, a bunch of slaughtered Knights Templar return from the grave to exact revenge on descendants of the villagers in whose town the knights were murdered. In many of these stories, the logic is warped in that there is supposed to be a need for justice so powerful that not even the grave can bar the way, and yet too often the murder spree of the zombies continues on long after the right is wrong, or more often, a large number of uninvolved civilians are killed just to satisfy the body-count fix of the audience.

 


Potential for Global Pandemic: Small, if any.


 


 


Limits to Disease Spread: These cases tend to be localized incidents.


 


 


Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: There’s a long and valued history of villagers with torches. Seems to work pretty well.


 


 


Likelihood That We’re All Toast: None.