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Zombies? Can they really be described as 'Living'?
If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been breaking off the beaten path as of late. Instead of focusing on film reviews or essays on film, I occasionally focus on one detail and analyze it to death. Sometimes I’m not sober when I do it, and things get ugly (See Battlefield Earth for example). Sometimes I’m just damned goofy when I’m doing it and my rant sounds like something this side of Bellevue (See The Terminator). I do this for my sense of humor, and hopefully for yours.
This introduction serves to set up what’s coming this week. For all my meanderings about how artistic film is, I wouldn’t be interested if it weren’t fun. I try to give this impression in my writing. I admire the artistry, I admire the technical expertise, and I have fun with it. That is why this week I’m going to ponder how long zombies live.
Watching Romero’s Night of the Living Dead series again, this question started to pop up. The first film used zombies as more of a catalyst to the people’s emotions, and the issue of a life span doesn’t become apparent until Dawn of the Dead and the not-so-good Day of the Dead. Now, I’m not that stupid…I know they’re reanimated corpses, and it is really evident in the makeup work that these things are decomposing as they move around eating people. But considering this, how long do they last?
It takes a shot to the head to destroy them. You have to kill their brains to kill the zombies. Taking this into account, realize that the brain is mostly water. Yet in Day of the Dead, we see many zombies who are so decomposed that the skin on their face is literally absent. Yet they survive to keep eating, even though they’re down to bones and a little bit of flesh on their torsos and appendages.
But wouldn’t the brain decompose first? What are the rules to this? Does decomposition to the brain destroy the creatures, or does it take some sort of more violent force (a shovel, for example) to kill these things?
Here’s my take on what should happen: The person dies. Within minutes of death, the corpse is reanimated as a mindless flesh eater who can’t be stopped unless the brain is destroyed or severed. They don’t work on instinct, as we learned in Day of the Dead. If you sever the head from the body, the head will still snap at people. So you have to destroy the brain. However, at death decomposition begins. While they search for people to devour, limbs rot, skin molds, etc. So, since the brain contains a lot of water, wouldn’t it be as susceptible as the other organs? That is, as they decompose they should literally keel over eventually from the brain trauma.
But they don’t. They keep going. I’m wondering what happens to these beasts. I’m keeping this short and insane because I want someone to tell me what’s going on here. Now, I don’t expect consistent examples. Day of the Dead was bad enough to pretty much discount overall. What I do want are hypotheses, theories, postulations, and half-assed comments on what the logic is behind these demons of the dead?
This is gonna bug the hell out of me.