Zombies,
zombies everywhere. At least, in movies and TV series. The last
decade has seen a proliferation of Zombie productions: the
Resident Evil franchise, the Walking Dead series and all its
spin-offs and copycats, even comedies like the “Scouts
Guide...”, and Zombieland.
Zombies
have been so popular it led one group of student scientists to ask
the question, “What if Zombies were real.” Using mathematical
formulas, and considering that one zombie could bite at least
one person a day, the group discovered that Zombies could wipe out
the human race in just 100 days.
However,
their professor was not impressed. He told them they hadn’t
considered enough factors, such as how many zombies could be
killed in one day, how much distance would people intentionally
keep from the Zombie population, and how many babies could be born.
Reconsidering these factors, the students discovered that, though the
population numbers would get dangerously low, the human race would
survive.
But
where did all these “walking dead,” the undead, and zombie ideas
come from? Many attribute it to the religious practice of
Haitian voodoo. In this practice, one could poison a living person
and put them in a state that appears as death. After burial,
they are taken from the grave by someone who desired to use them as
their slave. So the word “zombi” originated from the voodoo
language, no doubt, and was introduced into English around the early
to mid 1800s. But it is unlikely that the voodoo type of zombi, to be
a slave, is the sole origin of the full zombie concept—the
biting and spreading of a zombie disease.
In
fact the concept of dead people walking, can also be found in Chinese
literature dating to the mid 1700s. There is also the literature of
vampires from Europe, which is just another variation of the
undead biting people.
The
concept of zombie is rather more symbolic of the many pandemic
diseases that have ravaged the human race throughout history.
Zombies are a disease ridden people who will spread the
disease upon contact. Staying away from zombies or letting them die
out, are the same common themes of an international pandemic.
The
Black Death of Europe is a disease that spread so easily and quickly
that it killed 200 million people. There were dead bodies everywhere.
People, even then, knew to keep their distance from the dead bodies.
They also stayed away from people who had the disease—who were in
essence “the walking dead”—alive and walking today, dead
tomorrow.
This
was only one of the many hundreds of pandemics that have swept
through countries and the world, killing thousands and millions in
just a couple of years. It is a familiar theme throughout the history
of humankind. There are even pictures in century-old
newspapers that represent these diseases as monstrous death-like
bodies reaching out to kill the living. If you saw them, you would
think they were zombie images, not news articles about diseases.
Having
lived through our own recent pandemic, it is not so far-fetched
to imagine that some type of a zombie-diseased apocalypse could
actually happen.