by
Christine Verstraete
You never forget those first frights—the
creak of the pendulum in the Poe-based film, The Pit and the Pendulum…. the
scare from reading Stephen King's Pet
Sematary— and the dog decides to make a noise at a crucial moment… staying up
all night reading when the house starts making strange noises…
I've filled my mind with enough
"gruesome" over the years that it's no surprise it's started to bleed
out in my own writing, though I tend to take a "lighter" approach
with the blood and gore. Then I got attracted to zombies. Yes, dead things.
Dead people walking.
Nothing new, of course. I've long been a
fan of old 1930's horror movies like Frankenstein
and The Mummy, both with Boris
Karloff (and both could be considered the first "living dead"), along
with White Zombie with Bela Lugosi.
Then I saw George Romero's Night of the
Living Dead (1968) and was initially creeped out, but later fascinated. Horror,
and zombies and monsters, even in all their gruesomeness are like a car
accident—you can't stop looking.
What many people, even those who typically
don't like horror, find compelling is the humanity. It's the people and what
happens to them in the movies or series like The Walking Dead that keeps them
coming back. It's the way that the story makes you nearly jump out of your
chair, despite the gruesomeness of it.
Romero is credited with starting the
flesh-eating zombie, quite different than the voodoo-made zombies in a trance
state from Haitian legend and in the early films. But… could it be real?
Journalist William Buehler Seabrook is credited with introducing the term
"zombi" (without an e) to the public through his 1929 book on Haitian
voodoo, The Magic Island, where he describes
reportedly seeing actual zombies. Of course, he also had an alcoholism problem and
later dabbled in the occult, too. But some sources have pointed to certain
toxins, like from the puffer fish, as being able to paralyze a person and turn
them into a "zombie". Haitian witch doctors also reportedly have used
plant toxins to render persons into semi-conscious "zombies" in
addition to casting voodoo spells on them. (See CNN
report.)
In fiction, of course, zombies are often
the heartless killers, all vestiges of humanity gone and forgotten. Or some
authors, including me with my book, GIRL Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie,
have created zombie characters that still hang on to some of their humanity and
struggle to survive in a different form, with a different reality.
Whichever approach, zombies usually are
scary; the real life boogeymen of today. They're the representation of all
things evil. They're devourers and symbols of the end.
Thank God they're not real…. right?
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