Who Wants Brains?
Think for yourself or start shambling

By Chris Eng
March, 2004

BOOK of ROMERO
CHAPTER 13
38) Jesus went unto the cave where Lazarus was laid to rest and commanded those present to remove the stone which stood in its entrance.
39) And the men did as Jesus bid, and the throng gathered tight around him and looked on at him with wonder.
40) And Jesus raised his hands to the Heavens and cried out for Lazarus to come forth.
41) Then, from the darkness, a figure emerged, bandaged hand and foot and around his body in the muslin of his graveclothes.
42) And Lazarus’ sisters Mary and Martha gaped, not only for the miracle that was their brother risen from beyond his grave, but for the fact that his visage was gaunt and there was a mad cast to his face.
43) Lazarus, spake Jesus, you have lain aslumber these past days—tell us what you desire most now that you are arisen.
44) And Lazarus gaped at Jesus and gawked at Jesus and shambled forth a step, then two, until in a hearty voice he proclaimed, BRAINS!
45) Jesus sidestepped the artless assault and tripped the man who he loved like a brother and placed a sandaled foot between his shoulder blades, pinioning him to the dust.
46) And Jesus drew forth his Colt .45, and did cock the trigger and place it at the back of Lazarus’ head, execution-style.
47) And he proclaimed above the undead wailing of Lazarus, in a voice loud enough for all present to hear, GODDAMN ZOMBIES!
48) And Jesus shot.
49) And shot again.

So you can see that zombie stories have been around with us since the Bible. In fact, Jesus himself rose from the dead and told us that if we ate of his flesh and drank of his blood we would gain everlasting life. It’s common knowledge that the transmission of the zombie virus is carried through the blood stream, so, by consuming the most miniscule amount contaminated flesh or blood, we ourselves become zombies and roam the world forever in search of more living flesh. Therefore, the Greatest Story Ever Told, is, in essence, a zombie story.

We should, then, take it as a symbol of piety from both the filmmakers and the theatre-goers that over the last few years zombie movies have re-experienced a vogue. Resident Evil (bio-engineered zombies), Versus (bullet-time Yakuza zombies), House of the Dead (raver zombies), Wild Zero (rock ‘n’ roll alien zombies), 28 Days Later (angry zombies), and the two most recent offerings—the newly remade Dawn of the Dead (mall zombies) and the forthcoming Shaun of the Dead (funny British zombies)—are all symbols of our faith… our faith that when the zombies finally come for us, we will have the inner fortitude to take them out with a .38 or machete or golf club or whatever large device of controlled mayhem happens to be nearby. Just as Jesus was eventually taken up with his Father’s aid, so we long for the chance to take out zombies with a farmer’s spade.

Because zombies are a part of who we are; they are a dark reflection of what we have become, and if we sometimes want to kill that portion of ourselves, we also want to viciously bludgeon open the heads of passing undead. As the pace of our lifestyle increased over the past decades, so did the speed of the zombies. The slow, languid shuffling (so endemic to Night of the Living Dead and other films from the ‘60s and ‘70s) has passed now, replaced by the frantic breakneck cadence of those obsessed with cell phones, email, text messaging, and PDAs. Zombies no longer have a saintly amount of patience, content to wander from place to place, taking in the sights until a living person happens to wander by for them to feast on—instead they seem concerned that if they do not consume as much flesh as possible in as swift a manner as possible, they may miss their chance at a one-shot deal. Act now: these brains are a limited time offer.

We relish every opportunity that we are given to dispatch zombies with extreme prejudice, because we love and hate the lives we have built for ourselves and the culture that we immerse ourselves in (so much so that in both versions of Dawn of the Dead we fight the hordes off in the mall—our new temples), and we love and hate these mindless beasts that are both us and not us. We cheer at the screen when those still living whack a zombie, and we cheer when the zombies swarm the humans. We applaud when the living use their brains, and when the undead turn the brains of those who aren’t using them into an impromptu banquet of brains tartare. We cannot make up our minds as to which side we support in this ongoing conflict, so we straddle both sides of the line. Zombies are the physical actualization of our dual nature, and if we cannot decide where we want to stand in our daily lives, why should we be able to decide whether or not we really want to see civilisation reduced to a smoking wasteland, populated by those who have cheated death and are simply fit to unload bullets into? We shouldn’t and we can’t, and we’re left in a state of paralysis, festering in the graves of our own making until sentience and a desire for free will leave us and we become those who we fear—those mindless drones who consume human flesh like DVD box sets of Friends.

The solution (and cure), then, is simple: we must think for ourselves, for only by thinking can we possibly escape the inevitable pull of zombiedom. In the movies, only the smartest and the most cunning survive (and sometimes, perhaps tellingly, not even them); and in real life, only the smart and those able to think on their feet manage to escape the entangling and narcoticising snare of popular culture and society at large. So keep thinking, keep moving, keep a low profile and keep assessing and re-assessing the situation—and, until the day arrives when we all manage to rejoin the human race from the ranks of the infected, keep going to zombie movies because there’s nothing more cathartic than watching our brainless brothers and sisters take one for the team… from a rocket-propelled grenade.