Read Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies for Free Online Page A

Jerusalem. Their flesh will rot where they stand, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. The people will be stricken by a great panic, and they will attack one another. (14:12–13)
    In the meantime, Jesus’s not-zombieness is helpful in illustrating a core quality of zombies: they aren’t the person whose body they occupy. Think of the body as a house and the zombie as a squatter. The rightful owners have moved on, and someone else has taken up residence in what should be an abandoned property. So if you ever have the misfortune of running into a recently deceased family member shambling up your driveway with a hunger for human flesh, don’t hesitate to take swift and violent action. That’s not Uncle Bob anymore; that’s just some freeloader wearing his skin and bones.

KNOW YOUR ZOMBIES: COLONEL HERZOG
Dead Snow (2009)
    Colonel Herzog and his undead Nazi troops behave much like mummies—they are preserved in ice, they just want their gold back, and they may not be contagious—but they’re called zombies by name throughout
Dead Snow
, making the intentions of this Norwegian romp clear.
    Earlier Nazi zombie movies include
Shock Waves
(1977) and
Zombie Lake
(1981), both of which involve ghouls rising from bodies of water to terrorize the living.
    ILLUSTRATION BY WILLIAM BLANKENSHIP



I went to a demolition derby several years back, and it struck me that the competing cars had a lot in common with zombies. If you’ve never seen it, demolition derby is a motorsport consisting of a number of similar cars competitively ramming into one another until only one is still operational, while the rest lie motionless and destroyed.
    Cars prepped for a derby are stripped down to their bare essentials. The lights are removed, the seats are ripped out, the suspension is cut down to a minimum, the dashboard is stripped, and the radio is trashed. Anything that doesn’t directly assist in the accomplishment of the driver’s narrow objective is history. Just like a zombie occupying what was once a fully functioning human body, the derby car is a shell of its former self.

    A derby car isn’t tasked with having a long and productive driving life. Its only goal is to survive the other cars on the track for at least a few brief seconds. Zombies are likewise designed not for longevity but, rather, for viability. They only need to live long enough to spread their infection to a new host.
    There’s a lot we can’t know about zombie physiology until the dead come clawing back for us. But examining the complex inner workings of a zombie through the lens of somethingas simple as a demolition derby may help to clarify the potential issues at hand. I know it does for me.
Re-animator
(1985)
DR. HILL:
I want your discovery. Whatever it is that gives the dead the appearance of life.
WEST:
It is not the appearance of life, it is life. This is not magic. I am a scientist.
DR. HILL:
I’ll have you locked up as a madman or a murderer!
    The scientific community has embraced the living dead as a legitimate field of study in recent years. Largely because of their uniquely biological roots, zombies are the perfect research subjects, and serious work is being done in a wide range of fields, from mathematical outbreak modeling to the theoretical construction of the zombie brain.
    In their paper “When Zombies Attack: Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection,” a University of Ottawa research team concluded that a large-scale zombie outbreak would lead to societal collapse unless dealt with quickly and aggressively. The
New York Times
included the work among its top ideas of 2009.
    That same year, Dr. Steven Schlozman, codirector of medical student education in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, gained national attention for his theory of ataxic neurodegenerative satiety deficiency syndrome (ANSD), which seeks to explain classic zombie behaviors such as slight uncoordination, reduced