I don't need to tell you, Mr. Speaker,
that zombies don't recognize borders and that
a zombie invasion in the United States could easily turn into
a continent-wide pandemic so on behalf of
concerned Canadians everywhere, Mr. Speaker, I want to ask
the Minister of Foreign Affairs is he working with
his American counterparts to develop
an international zombie strategy so that a zombie invasion
does not turn into a zombie apocalypse?
(cheers and applause)
Coming up next on Action News 7, a dog was found...
excuse me just one moment...
I see.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm receiving a special broadcast
about something that's happening.
Van Dorn Street is blocked right now by overturned cars.
We are receiving news that the bodies of the recently deceased
are returning to life and attacking the living.
Officers are on their way right now to take you to safety.
...A live reporter out there on the scene.
(screaming)
There are millions, millions of zombies
roaming the earth chewing people up.
Is that crazy or what?
I suggest you find the tallest building
in your town and jump off.
The zombie outbreak is no longer an outbreak,
but a full-on pandemic.
Warning you to stay indoors, to lock your doors,
to arm yourself with any weapons that are available
and this is America so you should have plenty.
Grab something heavy, something that you could hit
very hard with, and let's party!
♪
♪ The living dead are keeping me up at night ♪
♪ They're hanging around outside ♪
♪ They're probably mad they've died ♪
♪ The living dead are gathering in the streets ♪
♪ I'm buried beneath my sheets ♪
♪ They're making it hard to sleep ♪
♪
♪ I hear them shuffle in the crowd ♪
♪ But do they have to be so loud ♪
♪ It seems to me that all their lives were spent being noisy ♪
♪ And now they get to do it twice just to annoy me ♪
♪ The living dead are keeping me up at night ♪
♪ They're hanging around outside ♪
♪ They're probably mad they've died ♪
♪ The living dead are keeping me up at night ♪
♪ They're hanging around outside ♪
♪ They're probably mad they've died ♪
I'm Jonathan Leonard from Geekscape and we're going to
find out what the average person knows about zombies.
A zombie is someone who's dead and came out of the ground
and is bleeding and is gross looking and they'll kill you.
What do zombies want?
Brains.
What are the zombie rules?
Zombie rules is that you die, but you don't die.
If you want to be more like angsty and metaphorical,
a zombie could be someone trapped in a workday
who lives in a box and doesn't have fun.
In Chinese tradition a zombie just jumps.
It doesn't talk, it doesn't walk, it just jumps.
What?
Arms out and then it just hops like that.
The zombie is a relentlessly aggressive, reanimated
human corpse driven by a biological infection,
so there's kind of three aspects to that.
You don't negotiate with a zombie, right?
You can't talk a zombie out of wanting to eat you.
You can't say, "Hey, go around the corner,
there's a family of five getting in a Winnebago.
You can eat all five of them and leave me alone."
Secondly, it's a reanimated human corpse, limited in
its ability so it's actually a rotting corpse.
Thirdly, a biological infection which is,
I think, what makes zombies really, really scary.
MAN: They're us and they're us having succumbed to
our worst fear which is our own death.
You can't outstrip them even though they're slower than you.
Eventually you have to go to sleep.
They don't, so even if you're a mile ahead of them,
when you're snoring they'll catch up and meet you.
And that's like death itself.
You do everything you can to stave it off.
You do the steps at Santa Monica, you don't eat red meat.
They'll get you in the end.
Most famous monsters, the big-screen monsters
have some kind of long-standing tradition
where their stories have been developed previously --
the vampire, the werewolf, even the slasher,
the serial killer comes out of a crime novel tradition.
The zombie comes kind of directly out of folklore
and there really wasn't a literary narrative tradition.
When you take a look at zombies in cinema specifically,
you can technically go back into the silent era.
There are, of course, classics like "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,"
where you have the sleepwalking character in there who is
very much zombie-like, and yet for all intents and purposes,
we all have kind of collectively agreed,
it all starts in 1932 with "White Zombie."
Zombies!
The filmmakers in the '30s and '40s were kind of
making up these stories out of nothing.
They weren't taking existing material and adapting it.
If anything, they were drawing on misconceptions
and misunderstandings of race relations in the colonies,
sensational ideas of what voodoo and folklore
really meant in Haiti.
They took that idea and they kind of merged it with
the visual style of Todd Browning
and the gothic tradition.
I thought that beauty alone would satisfy,
but the soul is gone.
I can't bear those empty, staring eyes.
So in "White Zombie," you get a narrative that takes place
in Haiti and it involves Haitian voodoo, but then there's
a gothic castle on the coast of Haiti for some reason.
So it's this weird fusion of a misunderstood,
sensationalized folklore with an established and successful
cinematic tradition for monsters.
The early films are always about
black people menacing white women.
It's really the enslavement by the former slaves
that makes that monster initially so terrifying.
The next major step in sort of the evolution of the zombies
of pop culture icon comes when science fiction briefly
takes the lead over horror in the 1950s
and then you get movies like "Invisible Invaders..."
People of Earth, this is your last warning.
...in which aliens resurrect human corpses and use them
like puppets to try to take over which is virtually the same plot
as "Plan 9 from Outer Space," one of the most infamous movies
of all time, and what's interesting about those movies
is there we have it, we have dead people coming back.
They're not demonically possessed.
They're not impelled by some desire to eat flesh
or something we don't know.
They're being puppeteered by aliens, but they're zombies
and they're more like the zombies we know today
than the ones that preceded them.
But then what happened was George Romero...
TV: The dead who live on living flesh.
The dead whose haunted souls hunt the living.
The living whose bodies are the only food for these
ungodly creatures.
(screaming)
"Night of the Living Dead."
We were trying to create a new creature,
somebody that was dead but came back.
We didn't have a name for that creature.
We called them ghouls.
I said, "George, who are these characters chasing this girl?"
He said, "I don't know."
And I said, "Well, when I was reading it,
it seemed to me they could be dead people."
He said, "That's good."
I said, "But what do they do? You don't say that either."
He said, "I don't know."
I said, "Why don't we use my flesh-eating idea?"
GEORGE: There was an article in "Cahiers du Cinema"
that called them zombies for the first time.
I was clinging to the idea that we had created something new
and when I read that article, I said, this ain't new at all,
so that's when I started to accept them as zombies.
(screaming)
"Night of the Living Dead" did not create zombies
but it rewrote zombie lore.
I like to say that there were zombie movies
before George Romero, the same way there were
space movies before George Lucas.
It changed everything.
It scrapped the old voodoo zombie and gave us
the plague-driven flesh eater.
The idea of the end of the world and zombies are around
and the world's been overtaken by them
and it's people against zombies and our population is dwindling
was introduced in that movie and no one had ever really
taken zombies in that direction before.
It's almost as if the zombie as we know it was some sort of
like biblical figure that's been around forever
and we can all pick up and use it.
It's not, it was George's idea, the whole biting thing,
the passing on the disease, the waking up -- all George.
What's monumental to me about that film was the fact that
in 1968, this film was released with a black man
and a white woman, and throughout the entire movie,
nobody made a big deal out of the fact that
we had two different colors.
It was pure survival.
GEORGE: We thought we were pushing the envelope a little.
We thought that some of the scenes with the guts
and when the kids get roasted in the truck...
we had actually one shot of a naked zombie from behind.
Bold -- that's about as bold as we went.
There were extreme audience and media reactions.
Reviewers who thought that we were satanically inspired,
that we were scourges, that our film should be banned.
Horror movies were not raw like that back then.
George's was almost like a real thing, a documentary.
The reaction to that movie is what really got me going
because it said people were fainting in theatres
and I thought, I don't think I want to see this movie.
It made me not want to see it and then when I saw it,
I was like, yeah, that's why I didn't want to see it.
I remember the first time I saw it was at a midnight screening
and the audience was absolutely terrified.
The sequence that blew people away was the little girl
down in the basement who we discover
is chewing on her parents' intestines.
The entire audience flipped out.
People got up and left the theatre during that scene.
Midway through the movie I hear this "boom, boom, boom,"
and I'm wondering what's going on?
Was this part of the movie?
And all of a sudden, I see this guy go down the aisle...
He blasts through the doors, out to the curb
and goes, blech... all over Cambridge Avenue.
I said, okay, I've got to meet this guy.
Whoever made this movie, I've got to meet this guy.
♪
♪ Driving slowly going home to see their mother's grave ♪
♪ Walking closely there's an old man whose clothes are decayed ♪
♪ John can see that she's frightened ♪
♪ So he tries to lighten the mood ♪
♪ They're coming to get you, Barbara ♪
♪ They're coming and they'll be here soon ♪
♪ Don't be afraid ♪
♪ They just want your brain and they're coming to get you ♪
The greatest zombie film in my opinion is "Dawn of the Dead."
Every time it's scary, it becomes funny,
and every time it's funny it becomes scary.
Zombies on an ice skating rink,
it doesn't get any funnier than that.
It almost as if history conspires to hand Romero
the absolute perfect metaphor for the zombie.
You couldn't do any better than that.
We're a nation that has become the shambling consumers
that walk up and down the hallways desperately wanting
to consume and we have lost all individuality.
It's absolutely perfect.
For me, "Dawn of the Dead" was kind of the seminal zombie movie
because it really was the middle finger
to the death of the baby boomers.
It was this generation that started off so idealistic
and was so, "Hey man, don't trust anyone over 30, man.
Don't trust anyone over 30!"
And then they turn 30!
(laughter)
I mean, that moment where they say, "What is that?"
And he goes, "Looks like a shopping center,
one of those new indoor malls."
See, there were no shopping centers.
That was the first shopping center that we had ever seen.
With the dawn of the death of the ideals.
Every time it's Black Friday, how can you not think of
"Dawn of the Dead?"
It's chilling and disgusting all at once, you know?
MAN: So there is this evolutionary process that George
is going through and in "Day..." what he does is he says,
okay, now we're going to see the zombies evolve,
and that was groundbreaking.
That's what George's genius is, I think, that he completely
swaps allegiances with his films.
Often, you'll root for the zombies which is, you know,
you never root for the zombies in contemporary zombie films
because they're at our protagonist's throats literally
and we don't want those protagonists to die,
whereas, with, particularly with "Day..." most of the human
characters are hideous, monstrous, aggressive military
types who you just want to see torn to pieces
and when Bob shoots Captain Rhodes, you cheer.
It's all down to Howard Sherman being just so sweet, you know,
when he's using the razor and he's on the phone
and he's listening to the music and he's hearing music
for the first time and it's like a baby.
I just think it's one of the most beautiful performances
since Karloff's "Frankenstein" as a kind of adult newborn.
There's something so deeply tragic
and sympathetic about him.
Oh, I don't feel that at all.
There's nothing tragic in a reanimated corpse.
How can there be?
A reanimated corpse is just a reanimated corpse.
There's nothing tragic about it.
You shoot it in the head.
Bob's your uncle.
HOWARD: Boris Karloff, with that role, had the opportunity to do
a lot of very subtle intimate things, most monsters don't.
In, as Bob, I did too.
I had a lot of very interesting, subtle,
and by genre standards, very unusual things to do
and the fact that I had the opportunity to do something
like that is what brought an element of humanity to it
that normally you just don't find in the genre.
GEORGE: I don't think zombies are intelligent.
I think that they just remember what they used to do,
what they used to be.
My zombie characters that have some personality, I think,
are just -- what they do because of their memory
makes them a bit heroic, but it's just memory.
It's just memory.
I mean, it's just like when you first see Big Daddy
in "Land of the Dead," he's doing what he always did.
He's trying to fill gas.
He hears the bell, "ding-ding" and he thinks a car came in,
so he comes out looking to fill somebody's car.
I mean, that's how stupid he is, but he's heroic.
(laughing)
(yawning)
What a perfectly average morning,
nothing unusual about today which makes it the perfect day
for a zombie apocalypse to not happen.
(humming)
It's beautiful morning.
Mmm, I smell breakfast cooking.
Oh, what's this on the news?
But it has been reported that the dead
are coming back to life.
Oh my God!
The president is declaring marshal law
for the state of New York.
Betty? Is that you?
Is that blood all over your jammy-jams?
Why are you just standing there?
Why is there a smoke machine running in the hallway now?
Oh well.
Even though I've seen this scene a million times
in every movie, I'm just going to slowly start
walking towards you with my arms outstretched,
asking if everything's okay, even though
this looks highly suspicious and at any moment you're going to...
Oh my God!
Zombies are the only horror films that I know where
you're totally minding your own business and you're not looking
for trouble and you're not the hot girl or the token black guy.
You've broken no rules to let you get killed
but they come for you anyway.
It's not about you, that's the main thing.
If something is going to eviscerate you, eat your guts,
you'd like it to be about your guts, right?
You'd like your guts to be special, but if I can just
step to the left and he eats that guy's guts,
it's not about me anymore.
Vampires are all about me.
They make me feel sexy and libidinal and all that.
Zombies, they could care less about me
and that's actually our biggest nightmare.
They don't sparkle.
Right.
(laughter)
Every time you look at a zombie in pop culture, whether it's
a movie or a television show or a comic book, anything,
it is ultimately just a reflection of things
we're afraid of at that moment.
When you start with "Night of the living Dead,"
1960s, late '60s, we're afraid of Vietnam,
we're afraid of the death we're seeing on television.
That's easy, but we're also afraid about what's happening
to the home, the nuclear family is breaking down.
So "Night of the Living Dead" becomes a literal
siege on the home.
Jump ahead ten years -- "Dawn of the Dead,"
what are we afraid of now?
Consumerism, consumption.
Jump ahead -- "Day of the Dead,"
now we're afraid of the Cold War,
we're afraid of the apocalypse, of nuclear destruction.
As the culture changed, zombies, to an extent,
changed along with it.
In the 1980s all of a sudden, you see them starting to
get a little bit funny.
You had "Return of the Living Dead,"
all of a sudden, you have all this comedy going on.
The '80s were sort of a little bit of a lighter time.
Brains!
But it's also desperately frightening and depressing.
That is probably one of the most, if not the most,
apocalyptic zombie movies ever made.
They're also the most indestructible and frightening
zombies in zombie movie history.
If you ever find yourself in a zombie apocalypse, the key,
the first thing you should look for is, are you in
the "Return of the Living Dead" Universe or not,
because if you are, give up, there's no hope.
Brains!
Another thing that's interesting about
"Return of the Living Dead" is it gives rise to one of
the longest-lasting aspects of the zombie in pop culture...
More brains!
...and that's the idea of the zombies
coming back wanting brains.
♪ Brains, brains, brains... ♪
So the '90's were kind of, I don't want to say they were
a dead era, but they were definitely slow comparatively.
Party's over.
"Dead Alive," Peter Jackson's Sumatran rat-monkey
family issue, gore-fest insanity.
It was probably the most important film of the '90s.
And then 9/11 came along
and all of a sudden, everything felt up-ended.
I think it primed the culture, the larger culture,
not the people who already like zombies,
but the larger culture to accept and entertain the idea
of apocalyptic scenarios being a possibility.
A few years later when Katrina happened, anyone who still had
faith, "don't worry, no matter what happens, we can handle it,"
this was an aberration.
I think that shook it as well.
I don't think the zombie culture would be where it was today
if it weren't for those kind of things.
It brought death to people's doorstep.
You have "28 Days Later" which has plenty of imagery which is
evocative of an apocalypse or a natural disaster.
This fear of disease, so we start seeing more and more
of the infection narratives and the invasion narratives
as a kind of a reflection of the fears of the 21st century.
Zombies are very versatile as metaphors because they are us.
They are the people among you,
and I think maybe that preoccupation in society,
the lack of safety that we're suddenly all feeling,
zombies are a good way to cathartically act out that fear.
What I always find fascinating about zombies
is the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" aspect.
The most horrific idea is that your brother, your wife,
your sister, a loved one, externally, on the outside,
that person is exactly the same, but on the inside
everything is gone, everything is erased.
KYLE: To me, what the zombie narrative is really about
is losing friends and family.
Having your loved ones turn against you, become monstrous,
but the biggest threat that you face isn't some nameless,
faceless, other monster -- it's your mom,
it's your sister, it's your wife.
That, to me, encapsulates the real terror of the zombie,
the fact that we all have the potential within us
to be monstrous.
♪
There's that trailer, it's called "Dead Island,"
it was a video game and you see this kind of freaky girl
attacking an older man and then it kind of all goes in reverse
ending with it being like a family vacation
and they're taking a photo together.
You realize it was his daughter that he's beating with a bat.
(laughing)
It was pretty awesome.
I dreamt about them last night, I dreamt about them.
I thought making "Shaun of the Dead" would stop
my recurring dreams about zombies, but it hasn't.
I still occasionally have a dream where I'm in
that classic situation where they're outside the house
and I can't get away and it's fucking terrifying.
"Shaun" happened because Edgar Wright and myself
were making a TV show, "Spaced."
The beginning of one of the episodes starts with me
lost in the game "Resident Evil" and it was just a very sort of
sneaky way to enable myself to shoot some zombies.
They totally captured that feeling of Romero's films,
that shambolic zombie.
It looked like they'd almost watched those movies
to get the way those creatures moved.
It really ignited that sort of love in me again,
and Edgar as well, and we started talking about
"Dawn of the Dead" and how much we loved it
and then we had "Dawn of the Dead" on set,
and we were like, we should make a zombie film.
Well, I have to say that "Shaun of the Dead" was probably
my favorite zombie film that wasn't made by me.
I think "Shaun of the Dead" is probably
the second most important zombie film ever made
because of the social commentary.
It encapsulates an entire generation
of young English people in the very same way
Kevin Smith's "Clerks" encapsulated my generation.
Forget zombies, I think if you just were going to look
at a movie that put that generation through a lens,
that's "Shaun of the Dead."
The "Walking Dead" came about because of my love
of George Romero films and zombie movies in general.
Most zombie films end with either all of the characters
dying or two or three of the characters living,
while all of the others die and they kind of ride off
into the sunset and you never know where they go.
The "Walking Dead" was devised as
the zombie movie that never ends.
I will plainly say that Bram Stoker is to Stephenie Meyer
as George Romero is to Robert Kirkman.
There is no "Walking Dead" without "Night of the Living
Dead," "Dawn of the Dead," "Day of the Dead."
I definitely owe that guy.
When Ben comes out of that house at the end of
"Night of the Living Dead," and you think he's getting rescued
and instead he gets shot...
Okay, he's dead. Let's go get him.
That's another one for the farm.
...the sinking feeling that that gives you,
the sense of loss, definitely inspires the way
that I want to mess with expectations.
If characters weren't dying constantly in a zombie story,
in an apocalyptic story, it would be completely false
and fake and unrealistic and it'd be complete bullshit
and there are times when I'm writing a "Walking Dead" comic
where I'll go, wait a minute, it's been like ten issues
and no one's died.
This sucks, someone's got to die this issue.
People gots to die, otherwise it's just dull.
Because the zombie was kind of organically created by different
people, I think filmmakers and authors and video game designers
feel they have a great deal of liberty with what a zombie is,
so we can have zombies that are dead,
but we can also have zombies that are alive.
You can have zombies that drink blood, but you can also have
zombies that eat flesh or just eat brains.
You can have zombies that are weak,
you can have zombies that are super strong, some zombies talk,
most don't, some can feel things, some can't.
That movie "Wall-E," you know, the Pixar movie,
I feel like that's kind of a zombie movie, you know,
when he goes up and the robot finds all the earthlings
that are just these fat blobs hooked up to machines.
Those are G-rated, benevolent zombies.
(screaming)
We got into this idea in "Reanimator,"
that when they're reanimated, that it somehow frees their
libido and so that's kind of what Dr. Hill is.
This is a guy who is lusting after the dean's daughter,
but never was able to really act on it until he's reanimated
and in the course of the movie, he converts himself as
the improved Dr. Hill.
In a way, it's a more honest doctor.
He almost breaks the rules of the zombie
because he has a stronger idea of who he is.
Deadites and zombies are from different families,
different species.
A deadite is someone who isn't necessarily dead,
they just got possessed.
It's weird, in "Evil Dead," we have both.
In "Army of Darkness," we have an army of the dead,
skeletons coming back and they get to talk.
I don't know how they do that without a larynx, but you know.
Bring on the wench!
I think with like "Army of Darkness," you didn't want
to be alive or dead, you didn't even want to be in that movie
if you weren't Ash, because everyone else is dead
or possessed ultimately.
Anybody that argues that because something is alive can't be
a zombie, obviously doesn't remember the history
about voodoo zombies and how it all started.
So I count the infected.
Even though Danny Boyle would say he didn't make
a zombie movie, but I'm sorry, he's wrong.
He actually made a zombie movie.
So the word zombie, as we spell it in English, is pretty close
to the Haitian/French "zombi," with just a terminal "I"
and it probably comes from a Congolese word,
"Nzambi" with an "N."
WOMAN: In some places, there is a God named Nzambi.
There was a revolutionary hero named Nzambi.
Some people have associated it with a type of bird.
Other people say there's a plant called zombie.
The zombie is somebody who was supposed to be dead,
but who's not.
The origin of the zombie in Africa was a separation
of spirit from body and being stuck in the mortal world.
WOMAN: Dutch slavers, Portuguese slavers heard tales
of these fears that the people had that
witch doctors were capable of stealing their souls.
They would steal a person's soul,
put it in some kind of vessel,
and then the body would keep laboring for the witch doctor.
Somewhere around the colony of San Domingue,
around the Haitian Revolution of 1800, the word zombie
and the soul capture mythology come together
and from that point on, we're talking about
the zombie as a walking corpse.
Zombification is just one of the things they do as a form of
punishment, where you go into a form of slavery never to return.
EMERANTE: Since he doesn't have any life, they think he's dead.
They bury the person.
He has a certain time to wake up.
They take the person out of where he is buried.
He's still half awake and half dead and that's a zombie.
If you want to understand what is a zombie, it is somebody
who has one part of his identity that has been torn down.
You have a part of your intelligence that's like a
window and when it's torn down, you lose your will,
and that will lead the will of doing bad things to others,
and this is what Hollywood has not understood
is he cannot do harm.
In other places, people who commit crimes are usually put
in a gas chamber or they are killed by the electric chair,
which to me is horrible.
In fact, it is desecrating the human being because
a human being should be treated with respect all the time.
To me, zombification is something spiritual.
Wade Davis famously went down from Harvard as an ethnobotanist
and he did some research into what could possibly be
the scientific origins of this tradition.
SARAH: Davis theorized that it was actually possible
with a poison, it's called tetrodotoxin, to poison someone,
give them the appearance of death that was so believable
that you could then have them buried, have a funeral for them,
dig them up later, and then keep them in a kind of comatose state
so that they would only be able to do the most basic commands,
so that, in effect, you could keep them as a slave,
as a slave that people would perceive to be
nothing but the walking dead.
KYLE: We have evidence that people being turned into zombies
was a real problem in Haiti because part of the Haitian
criminal code actually has a law against
turning people into zombies.
It's actually on their books.
It is illegal to poison someone, bring them back,
and sell them as slaves.
SARAH: Even though we think of this as an American monster,
this is part of a bigger mythology,
one that isn't uniquely ours, but is more global, one that
really comes to us from Africa, and from its inception,
is very much about slavery and from its sort of pivotal turn
it makes in Haiti, becomes a lot about slave rebellion.
Damn Zombies.
These nails cost me $2.49 a box.
It's a good thing I had all this scrap wood though.
Well, that's that.
I wonder if these zombies are going to be the fast ones
or the slow ones.
I hope they're the slow ones because I'm an old man.
Oh, there's one now.
Oh great, they're the fast zombies.
That's no good for me.
Oh, wait a minute, it's just a jogger.
Whew...
Well, that's good, but that still doesn't answer my question
whether or not the zombies are fast ones.
Oh, I guess they're slow ones.
Well, that's good news for me that they're slow ones, but
wait, if you could just run away from slow zombies with ease,
then why aren't all new zombies old people like me?
In fact, how does a slow zombie outbreak even get out of control
in the first place?
Now I could maybe see a slow zombie outbreak getting out of
control in a densely occupied apartment building, but way out
in the country where there's just so much distance
in between the infected and the living?
Well, not so much.
STEVEN: The slow versus fast debate is one of
my very favorites in zombie worlds.
I'm partial to the slow zombies.
I actually think they're way scarier.
If something's fast and it's running after you,
you just got to run.
If someone is slow and shambling towards you, you wait because
we have this desire that it's still human, right?
Like you think, that looks like my girlfriend, still looks like
my girlfriend, she's stumbling a little bit, but maybe
it's my girlfriend with a broken ankle, you don't know,
and you let her get just a little bit too close.
All you've got to do is walk slightly faster than her,
but you don't.
MAX: The slow zombie gives me time to think about
how I'm going to die.
It's the difference between getting shot and getting cancer.
It's about considering all those horrific possibilities.
SIMON: The whole fast zombie thing just misses the point.
By removing any aggression from them, by stopping them from
being almost like screechy and raptors running at you,
they've become something you can project depth onto.
That's what's so great about slow zombies is that
you're given time to get to know them
before you shoot them in the head.
I do have a whole new level of respect for horror film actors,
but especially zombie horror film actors because when they're
slow, you really have to sell the fear, you know what I mean?
You have to sort of like create scenarios in which you don't get
away from these people that are moving at the pace of a snail.
Somebody once asked me, would you write a zombie
survival guide for fast zombies?
I'm like, yeah, it would be a pamphlet that we'd call
"Kiss your ass goodbye."
(laughter)
I would argue that potentially "Shaun of the Dead" had a lot
of influence in kind of killing the slow zombie in movies.
If you have two bumbling idiots who can throw records at zombies
and sort of accidentally kill them, it sort of causes problems
in terms of trying to make the slow zombie really scary.
TOM: This makes me think of when I directed
"Night of the Living Dead," we hired a movement instructor
because my idea was if you're a zombie,
then you leave your body.
It's like if your body is hung on a fence and something comes
and takes over the body, that's never moved a human body before
and tries to move and walk, but it was laughable.
People were doing all kinds of stupid weird shit with it.
Just walk slow, okay, just walk slow.
Because as you know, George Romero believes in slow zombies.
He sells bumper stickers that say, "Fast Zombies Suck."
My basic objection to fast zombies is that it's impossible!
If they're dead, if they're dead.
SIMON: You know, there's an argument that Bill Hingmen,
who played the very first zombie in "Night of the Living Dead,"
he was pretty spritely as a zombie.
He wasn't moving particularly slowly.
The beginning of zombie evolution started with
quite a quick-footed zombie to be honest.
GEORGE: When we were making "Night of the Living Dead,"
we had no sense of rules.
It wasn't until I finally agreed to do another one that I said,
well wait, we've got to have a little process going in.
We have to have something.
I know that Bill moves pretty quickly so I think I've sort of
violated my own rules there, but I wasn't even...
I didn't even have rules then.
Zombie purists sometimes can get quite adamant
about their feelings.
I had a woman one time chastise me for making my living
in horror and not knowing that zombies don't eat brains.
These movies come out and we get these like really particular
zombie enthusiasts that will rip them apart on a message board.
I'm like, come on guys, it's a porno.
S.G.: The zombie purists want their zombies to be slow and
shambling and I like to say that they get kind of Dr. Seuss
"Green Eggs and Ham" about their zombies...
They do not like them when they run, they do not like them
when they're fun, they do not like them with a heart,
they do not like them to be smart.
They just want them to be slow and shambling and mindless.
Fast zombies, slow zombies, if zombies want to shoot lasers
out of their eyes and it works in the story,
I think that's fantastic.
If you're a dead guy and you're walking around, maybe you're
eating people, maybe you're not eating people, I don't know.
If you're a dead guy walking around, you're a zombie.
For me, "28 Days Later" was the first time I saw them
sped up and I just thought that was genius.
How did we not think of this sooner?
Zombies have been around forever and no one has ever thought
to just make them sprint.
I mean, why wouldn't they?
If they want the food, they just fucking go get it.
So that was truly terrifying.
I don't think there was anything charming about those zombies.
Fuck fast zombies.
I fucking hate fast zombies.
I hate them.
Now "28 Days Later" -- not a zombie movie.
Infection, those people were infected, they aren't dead,
so not a zombie movie, just for the record.
Slow zombies don't cut it for us often anymore.
Our fears are more intense.
The world is faster.
Our technology is faster.
We need a faster zombie and I think a great example of it
is bringing us all the way up to the present day
and the "World War Z" film adaptation, where you see
a virtual tsunami of zombie bodies just rushing mindlessly,
they're not even human anymore,
they're not even distinguishable as individuals.
They're just a mass of flesh just washing over us.
So I was asked to be a scientific consultant
on "World War Z."
I had to remit to think about zombies as if
they were the product of natural selection.
If natural selection is at play, we should expect to see very,
very different things.
We should expect to see cooperative behavior
among zombies.
So before they get bitten, they're individual humans
with individual interests and different genetic relatedness,
so they should be selfish.
Once they're bitten, it doesn't matter which zombie bites
the next human, so long as the virus gets there.
We see many examples in nature of groups of organisms
moving more quickly when the individual desire is subjugated
to the success of the group.
You know, the milestone in zombie culture is the failure
of the producer of "Night of the Living Dead"
to renew the copyright because what that did is it put
the picture in public domain and meant that it was going to play
on every cable TV station and every midnight movie possible.
Anybody who had a videotape of that film could put it on
their local television station and play it on Halloween
or at midnight, and they did, and so many other imitators
came along and parody filmmakers came along.
Kill the brain, kill the brain.
Lock and load.
And even great filmmakers like David Cronenberg
owe an enormous debt to Romero,
an enormous debt to the "Night of the Living Dead."
Zombies are definitely part of mainstream culture now.
I mean, there can hardly be anybody left,
at least in the English speaking world,
who hasn't seen a zombie movie by now.
I think the advent of video games and third-person
shoot 'em up games did more for the zombie genre
than a couple movies even.
I mean, I bought a Sega just so I could have one of those
shitty orange guns and I could shoot at zombies.
Zombies have even infected video games that are not
zombie video games.
The "Call of Duty" franchise is probably the most famous
which has banked through its last few iterations
on zombie mode as being one of its big draws.
When zombies are so popular that they're going to shoehorn
zombies into non-zombie games, we know that we've reached
a point of saturation in our culture, triumph of the zombies.
GEORGE: You could put on "Sesame Street," a zombie,
and kids would know what it was.
Kids would know what it was, a zombie, oh yeah.
Zombies don't eat meat because they can't have meat.
They only eat your brains.
When they eat your brains,
the human brains come in their brains.
STEVEN: So in the last probably two and a half, three years,
they've gone from an underground rabid cult following --
people love them -- to this huge pop culture
mainstream following.
You just got to put the word zombie on something
and it sells.
What if say technically you were not alive,
like maybe you were undead?
Like a zombie?
Whoa, let's not go putting labels on people.
I'm a zombie.
I'm here to tell you how to best prepare
for the zombie apocalypse.
Don't be afraid to bash our heads in.
We could easily be taken out with a well-thrown rock...
or a two-by-four.
You want to know the best way to survive the apocalypse?
Get the right health insurance.
This interview with a zombie brought to you by the good folks
at Rocky Mountain Health Plans.
You see them in commercials now, you see them in movie
theatre ads, I mean, zombies are everywhere, man.
You want to talk about when is the zombie apocalypse coming?
It's here.
No! It's Zombie-Con weekend!
(screaming)
There's got to be more of us out there.
No! No!
The number one show on cable that beat our show,
"Burn Notice," which was the number one show on cable,
is zombies.
How we got to be so popular is blind luck.
It's as simple as that.
Somehow we managed to tap in on some sort of public zeitgeist
that wanted this sort of product at that sort of time.
I'll meet somebody on the street and a guy will come up and say,
oh my God, I love "The Walking Dead," stay right here,
and he'll run over and he'll bring his wife over and his wife
will be more excited about "The Walking Dead" than he is!
I've always been uncomfortable with the success of
"The Walking Dead."
When it debuted as a comic, it was like, oh wait, this thing is
way more popular than it should be and it just kept getting more
and more popular and then when the show happened, I honestly
didn't think the show was going to be successful at all.
I was hoping and praying that the show would be
just successful enough to continue.
It honestly makes no sense to me whatsoever.
I don't know how this show is as popular as it is.
They're joining the ranks of the blockbuster pop culture
icons, like superheroes and action heroes.
S.G.: Werewolves are kind of like the jocks of monsters.
They're full of testosterone and sprouting hair all over
the place and full of rage and screaming and running around.
Vampires are kind of like the fraternity boys.
They're always sort of suave and slick and trying to convince you
to get into bed with them so they can drink your blood,
and zombies are kind of like the nerds and the geeks,
you know, they don't get the girls,
but they don't have any ulterior motives.
They wear their emotions on their sleeves.
They say, I am a zombie and I want to eat your brains.
It's a monster that's completely honest.
A vampire seduces, a zombie feeds, a zombie goes after you,
and some people, they're turned on by that.
They're turned on by relentless desire.
They want to be desired like nothing else.
You know, nobody wants to be raped in real life but a lot of
people have rape fantasies and sex with the zombie
is probably the ultimate rape.
Shit, another walker.
Don't worry, I got this one.
No Glenn, put your dick away.
It is tough to make a zombie porn because you kind of
have to violate every law of porn and then you're also,
at the same time, violating all these zombie laws.
It's been some day, hasn't it, son?
Yeah.
You got lost and then united, had a threesome with your mom
and my best friend.
Now Carl, I've got to know, do you have it in you to go over
there and fuck that girl, and kill her with your cum?
JOANNA: "Walking Dead" definitely sold the most
out of probably any other porno we've ever made.
People love playing the role and I think it is also an element
of domesticating it, making it safer, making it fun.
Zombie culture has really blossomed.
You have zombie walks or zombie crawls, if you prefer,
zombie runs, zombie fashion shows, zombie beauty shows,
zombie weddings, zombie engagements,
zombie birthday parties, zombie car washes.
I would never have let a zombie wash my car.
(laughter)
Are you ready to meet your maker?
You're not gonna because you're gonna come back
to be a flesh eating beast!
Are you ready?
Get ready to tread or die today!
Runners, take your mark, set, banzai!
Suckers!
♪
I made it! I made it! I made it! I made it!
I was coming to the first annual Seattle Zombie-Con and a couple
approached me who were going to the convention.
They wanted to be married by me as zombies, and I'm like,
"But you want this to count, right?"
And I thought, you know, their poor family.
This is a sacred thing, getting married, you know?
And they're doing this as zombies and getting the idiot
guy who played Ash to marry them but then you see their family!
Who gives this zombie woman to be married to
this lucky zombie man?
(growling)
Alright, dad, go take a nap.
The father couldn't sit down because he came as a guy who had
a spike that had impaled him and all the family came as zombies.
Zombies don't think about what they're doing,
they just do it.
Am I right, zombies?
(cheering)
Come on, you freaks!
Now shut up, I'm still talking.
Anybody needs zombies married, I guess I'm your go-to guy,
but I've only performed one because they're going to get
really expensive now because it's just too weird.
Zombie fans, I think, are, I don't know,
I can't identify who zombie fans are.
Who are zombie fans?
Are they fans of the genre?
Are they fans of horror movies?
All these people that come out for zombie walks, what is it?
What is it that appeals to zombie fans?
I think that anyone that made "Dawn of the Dead" would have to
understand what zombie culture is about.
There is so much in that movie that's just about humans
and human nature.
You have to know, like, you have to see that.
I don't know.
That doesn't make sense.
Don't put that in there.
(laughter)
TOM: I've seen a crowd of people go into the middle of a square
as zombies and then all of a sudden, "Thriller" will blast
and they all do the "Thriller" dance,
that I would like to participate in, but not the zombie walk.
I don't get it, I'm sorry.
Well done to you people dressed as zombies.
Good for you.
I don't get it.
That would be like me dressing up as someone with Ebola.
(laughter)
It'd be like, come on.
There's going to be 16,000 people in Denver all walking,
pretending that they have testicular cancer, come on!
(laughter)
WOMAN: It's nothing new that zombies walk,
that's just what they do.
And I never say that anyone ever invented the zombie walk
because that's their kind of monster character.
I think maybe the very first time I ever dressed up as
a zombie was for the first annual Denver Zombie Crawl.
There's probably like 15 or 20 people, and I was like,
God, this is so cool! What a great idea.
We're all going to dress like zombies and pound on the windows
while people are eating dinner and this is the coolest thing
ever, and then the next year, it was like, oh my God,
there's like 50, 75 people -- cool!
And then the next year, it was hundreds and I think
last year was 15 or 17,000 people --
families, professionals, children.
It's amazing.
It's a punk thing, it's almost punk, right?
Making a statement, saying, I don't want to be part of
this life, I'll be a part of that life,
but I don't want to be a part of this life.
I think that's really what it is.
It's frustration, man.
SARAH: I mean, it's all in good fun.
It's play, but I feel like underneath that is a little bit
of danger and there's a message that's being sent that says,
you know, if we wanted to, we have the capacity to organize.
Here we just got 10,000 zombies out in this public square
so I felt like it's a kind of tacit message to our government.
DR. BLOCK: If you're into zombies, the zombie walk
is like date night.
If you're dressed as a zombie, sometimes that helps,
especially if you're a little looks challenged.
It's very liberating to be purposefully ugly.
You can let your Id out.
WOMAN: I do think corpses are a little bit attractive.
I was sitting next to one earlier
and I'm going to tell you, he was pretty handsome.
I liked holding his hand.
He was big, kind of buff, even though he was bony.
I think people are thinking too hard these days about,
"Whoa, what's this zombie phenomenon?"
People love to dress up, they love to be other characters,
they love to escape from themselves.
The costumes are amazing, they're cinematic,
there's incredible gore.
There's incredible creativity.
Where else can you see a Lego zombie?
I don't know why people come out and do it.
I have to pay union wages to get them to come.
(laughter and applause)
I think it's about getting connected again.
It's so interesting to me, like, I see these zombie walks
and nobody is tweeting or emailing or texting.
They're actually talking to each other and I know that
sounds a little too peace and love and all that,
but it actually reminds me -- I used to follow Grateful Dead
around when I was in college and it reminds me the most
of a Grateful Dead show.
Not in the way that people are checked out, but in the way that
people are actually nice to each other.
That doesn't happen very often.
It doesn't happen at a ballgame, but it happens when people
dress up like the walking dead and walk down the street.
KYLE: Sometimes it's more fun to watch the audience
than the participants because whether they know it or not,
the audience just became participants.
The great thing about the zombie is, you get bit by a zombie,
then you're one of them and you're part of this collective,
you're part of this hoard.
Well, zombie fandom works the same way.
I think that's kind of the cool thing that's coming
from all of this.
Maybe people are getting a skinned knee when they're doing
the zombie obstacle course, but they're having fun,
they're having a good time, so to a very small degree,
they're improving people's lives.
(laughing)
Bravo 2 to Bravo 1, switch has been pulled.
Any change in situation upstairs?
That is a negative.
Carry on your search, over.
Keep looking down there, gentlemen.
(gunshot)
Bravo 2 to Bravo 1...
(screaming)
Bravo 2 to Bravo 1, come in, over.
Bravo 1 to Bravo 2, get your ass up here now!
Move! Let's go!
Stay low, watch your heads.
Single file up the stairs, gentleman.
Guys, I need two eyes on this doorway behind me.
Make sure it's clear.
Holy shit!
What the fuck is that?
The armor that that thing has got built into it
will take a 50 caliber.
Our shotguns are gonna do dick and squat.
Anything happens, you go there as fast as you can.
No dicking around, yeah?
♪
Move!
(screaming)
This is an event where we provide a total immersive
zombie experience.
From the minute they arrive at the event,
they are thrown into basically a narrative storyline.
Everyone's got an idea of how they would handle
a zombie apocalypse.
We're giving people the opportunity to try that out.
(screaming)
MAX: "The Zombie Survival Guide" came about during the Y2K scare
of the late '90s.
That was a time when people were starting to prepare for this
sort of nebulous apocalypse that they didn't really understand.
America specifically had been experiencing the largest
post-war boom in its history and times were good, but there
was this feeling that times were about to change and all these
survival guides were coming out and I noticed that none of them
were addressing my fears.
Granted, zombies are not real, but that certainly didn't stop
anybody else from publishing survival guides about all
the other things that were going to happen that were not real.
Zombie movies are essentially disaster movies and I think
there has been a sense from 9/11 on, that the system is breaking
down, and we want to know what the end game is psychologically.
We want to know what is all this leading to and the problem is
if you watch a movie where the catalyst for that disaster is
real, like a real nuclear war or a real plague or a real
global financial meltdown, you will not sleep that night.
So if the catalyst is something like zombies, then you can say,
oh wow, look, neighbors are stabbing each other and there
are no services and FEMA is incompetent and the president
is flying over going, "That's peculiar."
(laughter)
But it's zombies, so that's totally okay
and then I'm going to go to sleep.
What would be your first order of business
in a zombie apocalypse?
Find some place that's fortified that I can control what comes in
and what comes out because if I can stop them
before they even come in...
Would it be a boat? What do you think?
I don't know, never thought about the boat.
You've got to think about these things.
Right.
Everyone has their chance today to be prepared.
You make the choice now whether you're going to be
prepped to live or prepped to die.
Top five things that you would suggest people prioritize
when they're creating a prep kit.
Water purification and filtration equipment,
first aid if you get injured, security hugely important,
shelter and warmth, and shortwave radio, ham radio.
What is your motto at Atlas Survival Shelters?
Better prepared than scared.
I build long-term survival shelters for private individuals
so that their family has a chance to survive
what's coming down the road.
And is something coming down the road?
I believe something is coming down the road.
a lot of people do.
What would you say if somebody said that
one of those threats was zombies?
Say that again.
What would you say if one of those threats was zombies?
What if they're fast?
If they're fast, you could spend upwards of $10,000.
So you're fucked if they're fast.
Yeah... you're fucked.
Your shelters are nuclear, biological, and chemical class
survival shelters, but are they zombie proof?
From the television zombies?
Yeah, are your shelters --
From the television zombies, they're zombie proof,
100 percent.
There are people who are always asking me,
do you have a zombie survival plan?
And I'm like, no, I live in San Francisco.
I don't even have an earthquake survival kit,
so I'm not exactly on Darwin's short list
for making it through this.
I always think getting to the attic would be a good thing to
do because they can't climb and you could lift up the ladder
and they wouldn't know you were up there if you were real quiet
but you're going to starve to death.
People make noise.
I've got a little girl now and I can't keep her quiet anywhere,
let alone in an attic in a house full of zombies,
so I think you'd have to get up, I think you'd go north.
Once I'm sure that civilization is as screwed up as, you know,
it would be in a zombie apocalypse,
I would jump off the tallest building.
I don't want to live like that.
I don't like being hungry.
You ever been hungry?
It's not fun.
I would hang on as long as I thought I could protect my wife
and kids, and then once that didn't pan out because
I'm pretty sure it wouldn't pan out, then I would go.
I think I would just have to run away and call my children
and wish them luck.
Do the best you can where you are.
I'll do what I can where I am.
I ain't coming to get you.
Sorry dude, you had a good life.
(laughing)
I love my family more than Bruce Campbell loves his family,
it's official.
I'm not a very good shot, I certainly can't shoot
a crossbow, I'm not a very good fisherman.
I would be like Homer.
Homer was blind and wandered around a really dangerous
landscape with a bunch of futile lords and somehow stayed alive
by telling people stories and was smart enough never to
have them end, right?
Because if then ended, then they'd kill him.
I would drive here, I would do zombie makeup on myself
and then just walk around.
The only problem would be if some dude with a shotgun saw me,
he'd shoot me in the head and then it would kind of
defeat the purpose.
Are zombies on the news coming? Did I miss something?
Are zombies walking up and down my alley
and I need to be ready for them?
I'm sure you've seen examples of people where there is
no separation and this is something that's real to them.
Wrestling is real to them!
What's up Zed Heads?
The zombie apocalypse is coming whether you like it or not.
It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when, and our homies
at Zombie Industries are going to help us prepare.
They've got the bleeding targets that you can use
to armor yourself up and protect your family.
Here at Zombie Industries, we're going to teach you firearm
safety, hand-to-hand combat, and how to put a bullet
right through a zombie's brain because it's your patriotic duty
to prepare yourself for the zombie hoards.
It's the end of the world and I feel fine.
We're going to train you up solid.
Ladies, show them what you got!
(yelling)
We're coming for you, zombies!
We understand that it's not a matter of if the zombies come,
but more of a matter of when and when they do,
we want people to be ready.
We're all about preparedness here and it really is
something that we think is a family activity.
Everybody in the house should be prepared
for when the zombies come.
We really want to instill for our customers to actually
have an avenue basically to come out and give them products
to train with.
Our targets basically have been shot in testing up to
about 2500 times, maybe a little bit more.
We've shot them with everything from a .22 all the way up to
a 50 BMG, so anything you want to throw at it.
All of our bleeding targets have 500 individual cells of blood
inside distributed through the center mass and through the face
so it's not one large bladder where you shoot it once
and everything runs out and the fun's over.
Our targets are designed to last all day.
Firearm safety is a very serious thing.
When you start talking about shooting three-dimensional
realistic human beings, people get uneasy about that,
but as soon as you make it a zombie, then it's okay.
We came out with the Chris zombie,
who is the quintessential zombie.
He still, to this day, remains our number one seller.
We did quickly move into the terrorist and the Nazi.
Zombies don't really discriminate
so we came out with an ex-girlfriend.
When people ask us all the time, how do you have a female
shooting target and I have to tell them, look, if it comes
right down to it, if my mother becomes a zombie,
it's going to break my heart, but I'm not going to hesitate.
I'm going to have to double tap her.
When the zombie apocalypse arrives, will you survive?
Zombie go boom!
Kick undead ass!
The USA-made Ka-Bar Zombie Killer Swabbie was created
to ensure you are prepared in the most extreme of situations.
Holy shit!
I didn't know if that was actually a possibility
to take somebody's face off.
The layers are ridiculous, crystal skull, extremely hard.
The crystal skull is actually probably harder than
a human skull and this was just easy.
How easy was that?
That was just as easy as the first strike.
ZGB approved!
Oh my God!
Calm down, it's okay.
I love that thing!
A common phrase in zombie circles is
"blades don't need reloading."
I always say, yeah but, blades need sharpening.
Have you ever tried to hit someone with the back end
of a machete?
Like the parts that aren't sharp or the flat end of a machete?
They'd be like, ah, why'd you do that?
You slapped me.
Pack of dogs, I'd have a big pack of dogs, big vicious
and small vicious dogs as long as there was dog food.
I guess the zombies would provide the dog food but then
the dogs, you know how dogs like to get into corpses and stuff
and they throw up.
I'd have to be letting the dog out in the middle of the night
so they could vomit and then the zombies
might get into the house.
It's interesting because if it did happen, people would think,
okay, so it's like Romero movies, but it might not be.
It might not necessarily be George's vision.
It might be something else.
You might cut their head off or smash it in and the body still
comes after you or something like that, you know?
(laughing)
I think, you know, movies show that there really
is no good weapon, they always find a way.
You're going to run out of bullets.
There's too many to hold off with a sword or a blunt object.
Fire doesn't stop them.
I mean, we're screwed.
I have never seen a zombie movie where someone dies of
dehydration, but that's going to kill a lot more people
than zombie bites.
I've never seen a zombie movie where someone has drunk from
a puddle and crapped themselves to death, but that's going to
kill a lot more people than zombie bites.
Starvation, disease, friendly fire, accidents, infections,
all these things are going to kill people a lot faster.
Liberals will become your zombies.
They're going to be the first ones to cry and moan and die
and they're going to be the first ones to do the looting,
the pillaging, and they're going to be the zombies.
Like a lot of liberal Americans, I was excited when Barack Obama
took office four years ago, but it's a very different world now,
and Mitt Romney is a very different candidate, one with
the vision and determination to cut through business as usual
politics, and finally put this country back on the path
to the zombie apocalypse.
He's not afraid to face a ravening grasping hoard of
sub-humans because that's how he sees poor people already.
Paid for by the Committee to Learn Parkour, like really soon,
like maybe take a class or something.
We talked to a lot of survivalists and preppers,
each of them stressing at the top of their list
the most important thing during any catastrophe --
you know, like a zombie apocalypse --
the need for clean water and water filters like this one.
So in the name of survival, I'm going to pee into this cup,
filter it, and then drink it, because if this filter works,
it's not really my pee anymore, right?
You ready for this?
Okay, here it goes.
I'm thinking like I'm at a doctor's office.
Alright, here we go.
Zombies are coming.
It doesn't help that it's fizzy.
It's warm.
It kind of tastes like water, yeah.
I think that was safe to drink.
We're good.
MATT I've tried to break down every state in the United States
based on zombie survivability and I used 20 or 30 different
factors -- topography, climate, public health infrastructure,
natural resources, military presence, on and on and on,
the most important one is population density, by far.
Up there also is gun ownership rate.
New Jersey ranks the lowest in zombie survivability.
Population density of 1,000 people per square mile
and a gun ownership rate of 12.3 percent.
Then we look at Wyoming -- population density of 5.6 people
per square mile and a gun ownership rate of 68 percent,
so it's like one dude with a gun sitting on a farm going,
"Hey buddy, do you see a zombie over there?"
And the other guy yelling over, "No, I don't see one!"
Five people per square mile makes very few zombies.
The entire northeast is totally screwed.
If you ever want a reason not to move to New York City,
that's a reason.
When zombies come, everybody's dead.
New York is the hero city, it just is.
Like I was in New York for 9/11, I was there for the blackout,
and look what happened with this horrific storm?
New Yorkers freaking came together, they kept calm,
they carried on, and they're dealing, so New York can handle
anything and it's the most densely populated place
in North America.
L.A., where I'm from, gone.
(laughter)
I think one of the greatest misconceptions in zombie
survival is that zombies are what you need to worry about
when you're trying to survive.
Zombies are only one of a whole host of threats that you really
need to face and I would argue that humans are as great
or maybe even a greater threat than zombies, right?
I'm not a horror fan.
I don't seek out fear.
I think that most horror fans, in their core, feel safe.
I don't.
I naturally feel scared so my writing is to exercise
an anxiety that I already have.
I base my zombies on AIDS.
Now AIDS is insanely hard to get.
It's not waterborne, it's not foodborne, it's not airborne.
How in the world did it kill millions and millions of people
and still killing millions and millions of people?
Because we, as people, were stupid.
If the President of the United States had gone on national
television in say 1981 and said look, there's a really, really
horrible disease, hard to get, but if you do get it, you're
doomed, so there's going to be a national education campaign,
we could have cured AIDS with a pamphlet and so it's easy to
imagine something like a zombie plague getting out of control.
MATT: Absolutely, a zombie pandemic is possible.
This new wave of zombies, this living zombie, that is created
by some sort of infection or virus that gets out of hand.
I really do think that it's more plausible now
than I did, say, five years ago.
Could a zombie apocalypse happen?
Well, let's examine what we mean or what the storytellers mean
when they say this.
They mean a parasite jumping from one organism to another.
This happens routinely.
60 percent of all human diseases come from the animals
that we eat or live with.
AIDS has infected 75 billion people
and killed 35 million people.
Bird flu and Swine flu, the Bubonic Plague in Europe
killed half of the population at the time.
The Spanish Epidemic in 1918 killed more people
than the First World War.
STEVEN: ANSD is the abbreviation for the disease I made up,
it stands for Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety
Deficiency Syndrome.
Ataxic means you don't walk well.
Neurodegenerative means that your brain is being degraded,
it's degenerating.
Satiety is a sense that you're full, the sense that you've
eaten enough and that's in your brain, too.
Your brain is what tells you you've eaten enough and it's
a syndrome because we don't know what causes it.
There is one thing that we can't ever do,
we can't raise the dead.
In the book I wrote, we philosophically decided
that they were dead because I realized medically speaking,
I can't have anything that makes the dead come back to life,
but other than that aspect, you can have brain pathology.
You can have neurobiological insults that will yield
a kind of presentation of a person who acts like
the zombies we see in the movies.
There are many splendid examples of parasites that control
behavior and often times, these examples are as fantastical
or even more fantastical than we can see in Hollywood creations.
So we have examples of fungi controlling ant behavior.
We have emerald jeweled wasps injecting a very specific mind
manipulator into the brains of cockroaches,
lots of examples of parasites controlling behavior.
We call them zombies and we even think about it now
in the context of zombie biology.
In the case of the ants, the case of the zombie ants,
what happens is that a regular colony of ants is living in
a tropical rain forest and in the course of foraging,
they walk through a patch of fungal spores in the ground
and these fungal spores attach tightly and start replicating
inside its body...and then at a particular moment when
the fungus needs to complete the rest of its life cycle,
it controls the behavior of this ant, making it leave the colony
and go out into the understory vegetation
and go to the underside of the leaf, deeply imbed
those mandibles into the leaf, because on the underside of
this leaf, on the platform, the fungus is going to grow
a large stalk from the back of the ant's head to produce spores
which are shot down into the forest floor
and the cycle continues again.
Why doesn't it happen for humans?
It really comes down to a numbers game.
There are almost a million species of insects
and there are roughly 5,500, 6,000 species of mammals.
So evolution just hasn't had the opportunity to play with our
minds, but despite that, we do see some really cool examples
in mammals of controlled behavior.
Rabies is something that really springs to people's minds.
MATT: When I was growing up, no one ever talked about Mad Cow
Disease, but Mad Cow Disease is in the news a lot now.
Here's the problem with Mad Cow Disease, it's created by
a protein and it's called a Prion, it's a mutated protein.
This protein, if it gets into your brain, it causes all
the other proteins in your brain to mutate also.
The new strain of this protein is showing evidence that
it can be transferred from blood to blood.
On top of that, the new symptoms are it causes you to go insane
and often violently insane.
Mad Cow Disease turned into Mad Human Disease
turned into Mad Zombie Disease.
We already have Mad Cow, we already have Mad Human,
and we're halfway to Mad Zombie, but the problem is
once it happens, it's too late.
There's no more polite discussion about what it's
going to be like and debating about the best way to survive.
It's run and scream time.
There's no more making movies, there's no more watching TV,
there's just, oh my God, I'm being eaten.
It appears the dead have risen and are walking among us.
These zombies have a certain sexual preference
by attacking only men.
Officials at the Pentagon are not sure if this is
a biological attack or if the zombies are simply
doing this by choice.
ALEX: In every town, in America pretty much, or any town of any
reasonable size, there's a group of young people engaged,
even as we speak, making their independent zombie film.
MAX: I don't know when the zombie craze is going to
die out, I don't think it'll ever die out completely.
I think they're, in some element,
they're going to be here to stay.
I didn't expect it to go on this long.
I happen to write "The Zombie Paper" and then later the book,
just at the right time and then it just keeps flying forward,
or shambling forward, I should say, this whole zombie thing.
There's probably a ceiling on zombie popularity, but I don't
know if we've seen it yet and I don't know when we will see it
but as long as things are fucked up.
♪
I've heard a number of people say, this is it, zombies have
run their course and now we're going to see vampires again
or we're going to see werewolves or we're going to see tapeworms.
I don't know.
DR. BLUMBERG: "World War Z," the movie, is a perfect case study
of not just how mainstream zombies have become,
but how much more mainstream they might become.
Because that film is a PG-13, it is sort of a new frontier
in a sense.
KYLE: And that was scooped just a little bit by
the "Warm Bodies" film because the "Warm Bodies" film
was kind of the first zombie date movie.
Now we have a zombie movie you can bring your girlfriend to.
GREG: You know, to me, zombie movies aren't zombie movies
without gore.
That's like doing a gangster movie, but nobody has any guns.
Part of the whole culture of it is the idea that you are being
devoured literally by another human being.
FRAN: From "Night of the Living Dead" to "World War Z,"
we've covered a lot of ground so it'll be interesting to see
zombies in space or something.
Not only do we have PG-13 zombie movies,
we have kid zombie movies now.
Hollywood is banking on zombies being that big, and to me,
zombies have always been small, little guys.
THEA: I really believe that it's something that connects us all
and it's going to get bigger.
ROBERT: They're gonna be on your streets, they're gonna be in
your stores, they're gonna be coming at you, whether they're
fast or slow or whatever the hell they are, but it's here to
stay, and you know what, if you don't like it, get used to it
because it's not going anywhere.
♪
♪ Our love story could be kinda gory, far from boring ♪
♪ We'd meet at a post... apocalypse ♪
♪ Yeah, I'd be slowly walking in a group stalking you ♪
♪ You'd be the only man alive that I could not resist ♪
♪ Then all of your friends they'd try to kill us ♪
♪ But only because they'd be jealous ♪
♪ That our love is deeper than Edward and Bella's ♪
♪ If I were a zombie I'd never eat your brain ♪
♪ I'd just want your heart ♪
♪ Yeah, I'd want your heart I'd just want your heart ♪
♪ Yeah oh, if I were a zombie I'd never eat your brain ♪
♪ I'd just want your heart ♪
♪ Yeah, I'd want your heart I'd just want your heart ♪
♪ 'Cause I want ya ♪
♪ You'd be hiding in a second floor apartment ♪
♪ Knocking all the stairs down to save your life... ♪
♪ From the undead ♪
♪ Double-barrel shotgun taking out the slow ones ♪
♪ Then you'd see the passion burning in my eye ♪
♪ And I'd keep my head ♪
♪ Then all of your friends they'd try to kill us ♪
♪ But only because they'd be jealous ♪
♪ That our love is deeper than Edward and Bella's ♪
♪ Oh...if I were a zombie I'd never eat your brain ♪
♪ I'd just want your heart ♪
♪ Yeah, I'd want your heart I'd just want your heart ♪
♪ Yeah oh, if I were a zombie I'd never eat your brain ♪
♪ I'd just want your heart ♪
♪ Yeah, I'd want your heart I'd just want your heart ♪
♪ 'Cause I want ya ♪
♪ And I'd try not to bite and infect you ♪
♪ Because I'd respect you too much ♪
♪ Yeah, that's why I'd wait until we got married ♪
♪ Oh, and our happiest days would be spent ♪
♪ Picking off all your friends ♪
♪ And they'd see a love this deep won't stay buried ♪
♪ If I were a zombie I'd never eat your brain ♪
♪ I'd just want your heart ♪
♪ Yeah, I'd want your heart I'd just want your heart ♪
♪ Yeah oh, if I were a zombie I'd never eat your brain ♪
♪ I'd just want your heart ♪
♪ Yeah, I'd want your heart I'd just want your heart ♪