Hump-Day Harangue: The Truth About the Zombie Apocalypse

This is a post I feel I shouldn’t have to write, and it’s almost embarrassing to address. It’s probably going to make me a tad unpopular with some readers, or perhaps it might make me sound a little arrogant—but so be it. I’ve been sitting on the sidelines for a while, and it’s time to make up for lost time.

By now, we’ve all been beaten over the head with the stores of “real-life zombies” and all sorts of “zombie-like” attacks being reported in the news. There was the lunatic in Miami who spent 20 minutes chewing someone’s face off. Then there was the other lunatic in New Jersey who ripped his own guts out and threw them at cops who were pursuing him. Plus the media poring through police blotters to dig up anything that sounds like a pattern from the last year, trying to make everyone panic and think that some kind of actual zombie uprising is happening. It’s what they love to do, and they do it well.

Folks, there are two elements to the harangue that I’m diving into today. My first thesis:

If You Really Think a Zombie Apocalypse Is Going to Happen, You’re an Idiot



The so-called "Miami Zombie" (left) and his victim.

 The scariest thing to me about this whole zombie conspiracy thing in the news is not any of the actual stories, but the way some people have really bought into the hysteria hook, line and sinker. Again, it almost embarrasses me to have to address, since I think that 99% of rational people realize that the concept of flesh-eating zombies is fictional and is not possible in the real world. Nevertheless, there is a contingent of mental midgets out there who really do believe that it’s happening. I know; I come across them every day.

I think these are the same people who believe Elvis is still alive, or that people are visited by the Virgin Mary in their bowl of Frosted Flakes. They’re the ones who think the world is going to end this autumn because the Mayans said so. The same Mayans who believed they needed to kill someone every day to make sure the sun would come up in the morning—forgive me if I find their scientific findings suspect. I’m living in Bridgeport these days, and no one said it better than that city’s patron saint P.T. Barnum—There’s a sucker born every minute, and two to take him.

I really think we’re living in a culture in which many people have lost touch with the boundary between entertainment and reality. These are the people who will quote chapter and verse about all the “rules” of zombie biology and behavior, as if they exist in some textbook somewhere, and weren’t merely invented by screenwriters to serve their narrative needs. What person could believe that an impossible supernatural scenario invented for a movie could somehow magically become real? Answer: A whole lot of them.

Not real.

Here’s the bottom line, and I apologize to all those without missing chromosomes who don’t need this explained to them: The modern movie zombie was created in the minds of George Romero and John Russo. It was later embellished by other filmmakers like Dan O’Bannon, Lucio Fulci and Edgar Wright. It is not based on anything that exists in the real world. It is fiction. A serious disconnect in logical thinking--or a lack of understanding of the creative process--has to exist  in the mind of anyone who would actually believe that the creation of someone’s imagination could just come into being—as if seeing it in a movie somehow makes it exist. It startles me how much people will simply decide something is real, just because they really want it to be real, and for no other reason. I think this is how organized religions get started.

If only this were true! Imagine if our favorite film genres could just spontaneously cross over into the real world? I love The Warriors—but I do not believe that New York may be overrun by silly, themed gangs of face-painted thugs just because that movie exists. I love kaiju—but I don’t entertain the notion that Japan will be attacked by giant monsters, simply because some guys made some movies in which it was.

My girl.

Look, if anyone knows about the delusional zombie fixation, it’s me. My girlfriend is a high-profile zombie personality, for crying out loud! Captain Cruella has many fans, most of whom are sane individuals (OK, maybe I’m being a little kind)… But there’s not a day that goes by that she doesn’t take note of the fact that there seem to be people out there who really believe she is a zombie. Who ask her legit questions about what it’s like to be one of the undead, without seeming to understand that she is a flesh-and-blood human being playing a character (sorry to blow up your spot, babe!) This is the kind of thinking that we’re dealing with here.

The sad truth? These are not zombies committing these crimes. These are just ordinary, run of the mill, garden variety wackos. And the further truth is that this stuff happens all the time—and that real people are far more terrifying than any fictitious beasties conjured up in the movies. There is nothing more to it than that, despite how ardently some delusional people may believe otherwise. Which brings me to my second point…

If You Think These Stories Are Funny, You’re a Creep

Alexander Kinyua, a Maryland college student
who apparently ate his roommate.

I think this may separate me from a great many of my fellow horror freaks, and that saddens me. I’m disappointed in a lot of you. See, I’ve talked about this before, but I’m not one of those horror fans who thinks that John Wayne Gacy is awesome, and fixates on real-life atrocities with morbid glee. I gravitate toward horror for precisely the opposite reason—to escape the far worse horrors of the real world. I like my horror fun, and these days I try not to take it too seriously. I don’t find real life horrors to be cool or badass.

Call me naïve, but I never imagined things would get so bad that news of murder and mutilation in the news would be met with ironic, amused commentary and downright joyful laughter from intelligent people. I’m all for making fun of things, but I’m a firm believer in the old axiom that comedy=tragedy+time. The key word there is “time”. Our culture has apparently become so desensitized that many people have no qualms about simply jumping on these “zombie” news stories and having a jokey field day.

Horror fans in particular are guilty of this. Is it the way we glut ourselves with uber-violent entertainment that enables us to no longer register pity or revulsion at these stories? I’m not advocating censoring or curtailing anyone’s entertainment, as I partake in much of it myself. But I think some of us need to sit down and realize that these are real human beings whose tragedies we are deriving so much entertainment from. These are not characters in a Friday the 13th movie, getting sliced and diced by Jason as we cheer him on. These are real people—could be someone’s parent, child, sibling, whatever. Could be you.

Do you think Ronald Poppo, the homeless man lying in a hospital bed in Miami right now, will find it funny or ironic when he awakes to discover that much of his face has been torn off? He will have to live with that for the rest of his life. Is the news of a man hurling his own internal organs at the police a “cool story” because it sounds like something that would happen in a horror movie—or is it rather something that we should find profoundly disturbing? In a humane society, stories of people attacking babies should not provoke snarky chortles. No matter how much these things may resemble scenes from horror movies, let’s not get so immersed in our entertainment culture that we forget the difference.

In short, Vault dwellers--flesh-eating undead zombies are not real. Never have been, never will be. What is real, however, is the fact that some people have suffered and witnessed some unspeakable violence. Let’s try to focus on reality, remember our humanity, and save our horror fantasies for the movies, where nobody really gets hurt.

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This Old Haunted House

Taking a little break from speaking about horror fiction, I would like to talk a little about horror fact. Don’t hold this against me, but I used to live in a haunted house. “A haunted house?” you say? Yeah, a haunted house. Two story, full basement, fully attached, single bath, on 77th Street in Brooklyn. For 19 years.

How is this possible, you say? I don’t know. I don’t really believe in the supernatural [though I do not affirmatively deny it, either]. But the house was haunted, and you don’t have to take my word for it. You can ask just about anyone who ever lived there, or even anyone who ever spent a little time there.

Like I said, it is a pretty nondescript house. In fact, the only thing that can really give any credence whatsoever to this series of vignettes is that fact that the house is rather old for our part of Brooklyn, built sometimes during World War I, and probably before America’s entry into it in 1917.

When I was a kid, my mother’s parents lived there, and we moved in when I was 4. I don’t recall really any strange experiences when I was that young, or any stories, but I didn’t like the basement. The stories would come later, which would only confirm events that I was around for. In the spirit of full disclosure, I never actually SAW anything. But my sister and my parents both did. My experiences with the haunted aspect were just amorphous feelings, instincts, hackles.

See, this house, which I loved dearly, and had many great times in, was the seat of my family’s warmth and love. But, for whatever reason, the shadows in certain corners were darker, more inky, than in other places. And there were certain parts which just didn’t feel right – a closet in a bedroom, corners in the basement – and at times it seemed like there were places light didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t, penetrate.

Like I said, I never affirmatively experienced anything. But I can remember being in the basement [which was always disorderly, chock full of stuff in random stacks] as a child, either playing with electric trains set up down there [it was the only area big enough], or looting though the vast, moldering library for many hours at a time, amusing myself with finds from the magical to the titillating. And at first, when I would turn on the lights, and the shadows would flee, I would be fine, and I would set to doing what I planned. And sometimes, after an uneventful while, I would feel something. I would feel it on the nape of my neck, or the base of my spine. And the little hairs would rise. And suddenly I realized that beyond the light lay the shadows in the corners. And then I didn’t feel so safe and secure, and when the opportune moment would arise, I would bolt back up the rickety stairs to the safety of the upper floors.

Then there would be other times, when I was old enough to be home alone [I guess around 12 or so], and I would come home from school, and my sister and brothers were at the sitter’s house, and I would, as just about every kid would do, watch TV. I would start watching at 3:30pm, watching GI Joe, the Transformers, Voltron, and maybe some other half hour long commercials. As the hours crept by, the house would get progressively darker, the shadows slinking ever closer. But me, being in front of the boob-tube, would seldom notice until maybe I was thirsty for more Sunny Delite. As I would turn to get up, it would dawn upon me that the house was, aside from the pale TV glow, entirely dark. And I mean COMPLETELY dark. And that is when I would feel like I was on display, out in the open. I cannot say I felt any overt malevolence, but it was certainly no attention I wanted. Again, instinct would take over and I would freeze until I could summon the will to move, and when I moved it was with the speed I could muster, and I would bolt to the nearest and brightest light I could. Once that light was on, I would then systematically turn on all the lights in the common areas of the house, and again breathe a sigh of relief, for once again I was delivered.

Okay, you're thinking: “Alright, this guy says he lived in a haunted house, and all he is telling us is he is a little wussy who was afraid of the dark.” But I said I never saw anything. However, when I was about 13, and my sister was about 8, and my whole family was home one weekend evening, my sister out of nowhere begins to scream bloody murder. She was upstairs in the bathroom, my mother preparing the usual Saturday feast, and my Dad and I in the living room, probably watching some type of sports. My father and I run up to see what’s wrong, and she related the following: she was taking care of business in the usual fashion when a silhouetted face appeared in the window of the bathroom door [there was an old style, fogged window on the upper third of the door], and the handle began to rattle. She realized it was too tall to be any of us, and thought there was an intruder, so she began to scream at a volume and pitch only achievable by 8 year old girls, and as she did so, the face disappeared.

My Dad and I [mostly my Dad, I was only 13], checked the upstairs, and nothing was amiss or out of place. My sister was not one to make such stories up, and she was clearly shaken from the event. That night we had my aunts [my Mom’s sisters] coming for dinner, and we told them about this strange story, and how silly my little sister was for scaring herself.

Instead of sharing in the laugh, they both looked at each other, and then at my Mom, and with knowing smirks, they each began to tell tales of when they were girls it the house, and of strange goings on, etc. One story they told me was of meeting an old lady after Church, named Mrs. Loughlin. Mrs. Loughlin and her husband lived in the house before my grandparents and sold them the house. Mrs. Loughlin, according to my aunts, told them that one day, years after her husband had died she walked into the bathroom to see him standing there shaving, only to disappear after he turned around to look at her. She then told of a boy, in his teenage years, who had lived there before her, and had died tragically while riding the train to a school dance, and was said to still inhabit the walls. This was the first time I realized that I lived in a haunted house.

Time passed, and the house remained in its usual state – shadows darker than usual, corners that remained uninviting, yet we were all living happily within. My parents had two more kids. While I still never saw anything, I would mark how objects would occasionally disappear, and reappear later in unexplained fashions. In fact, I named this effect “Fred” and joked with friends that Fred lived in the basement.

Then one summer evening before I went away to college, I came home late from hanging out with the guys. My parents had had company for dinner that night, and were still awake talking after the company had left. As I come in my father calls me over to the dining room, saying they has something to tell me, which turned out to be the definitive ghost story from 77th Street.

The story went as follows: after the usual large Saturday night feast of steaks and all the sides, and after the company left and the boys [then 8 and 5 years old, respectively] were put to bed, Mom and Dad stayed up, talking over a glass of wine. Both my sister and I went out. At one point, when all was quiet, they hear a snuffling, a whimpering, of a child, and cautious footsteps one at a time coming down the stairs. My Mom said she called out to the footsteps, thinking it was one of my brothers upset at something, maybe not feeling well, or had had a nightmare. When she called the footsteps stopped. My father told me he called out next, this time using their names, but there was no response. At this point they both realized something was amiss, and my Dad got up and started towards the stairs. He then told me that as he approached the stairs he heard the footsteps go up, one at a time but quickly, and as he got the foot of the stairs, he saw a shadow turning the corner of the landing. He went up the stairs, and there found both my brothers both sound asleep, wrapped tightly up in their blankets. They had never gotten out of bed.

It was clear they both were disturbed by this tale, though also somewhat exhilarated, in that they felt that they were privy to something truly mysterious and otherworldly, or at the very least, weird. They asked what I thought, and I didn’t have a good answer for them.

Years later, the year I graduated college, our family moved out to a new house. My Dad and I spent many hours cleaning out the various corners of the 77th Street house, including the most forbidding of corner and closets. It was in more ways than one a cathartic activity. The next Spring, while we were waiting to sell the old house on 77th, I was using the all but empty house as a study hall for me and my study group from graduate school. We were there daily, and we even made up keys for them in case they had to get in and I wasn’t there. During our finals that Spring I was going to meet my fellow students one day, and for whatever reason I arrived a few minutes after they did. I found them both sitting on the front stoop, with the front door open, and the both of them wide-eyed and ashen faced. I asked what was wrong, and Pat said that he didn’t know what was up, but they both had no idea what was going on. I turned to Cheech, and he said that they were sitting there, talking about the day’s study itinerary, when there was a flash of light from nowhere, and a set of bongos that Pat [a Deadhead] had brought over on another day began to play by themselves. At that these two fully grown men, in the middle of broad daylight, ran out of the house in fear. I am not making this up.

At that point I was constrained to explain the history of my soon to be former house, and after that it took a little reassuring to get them back inside. I had to say it was a little creepy, but nobody ever got hurt. After a little while, we reconvened our study group, but they were never able to just let the random sound of the house settling go without a furtive glance.

I swear to you, gentle readers, that the events as set forth above are 100% true, and that I only changed some names for the sake of privacy in these electronic days.

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