| Apocalypse How? BRAINS! |
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| by PJ Punla |
| Monday, 18 January 2010 10:27 |
 The past few years have seen a resurgence of interest in supernatural themes and topics in the global collective that we call “pop culture”: how else to explain the boom of the Harry Potter books and, more infamously, the Twilight franchise. And how about the boom in Asian horror movies, packed full with assorted haunted women and children of the Sadako type? One of the types of supernatural beings that has suddenly come back into the limelight during the Noughties, though, is the one that still haunts the nightmares and informs the deepest freak-out moments and fears of the general populace: the living dead. Brains....brains....  Yep, they’re still in our nightmares and there are still people chronicling the stories of characters beset with that singular menace, a plague of flesh-eating, brain-craving zombies. They’ve been making movies and setting interpretations of these genuinely frightening things for some time now: witness the 28...Later movies, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its sequels, and the very recent film Zombieland. Witness books such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (no, we are NOT kidding) and Stephen King’s Cell. And witness the surge of video games in which players battle through hordes of the undead, trying not to join the horde themselves; the Left 4 Dead franchise is the strongest example at present. Oh, and never forget the super smash hit single Thriller by Michael Jackson, which introduced everyone to that dance of the living dead – so popular that the inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center shot to Internet viral fame via their recreation of the dance video. What makes the whole idea of zombies taking over the world so visceral and so enduring such that we’re still talking about it – and having nightmares about it? Max Brooks, author of the books The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, has this to say on the subject: Other monsters may threaten individual humans, but the living dead threaten the entire human race.... Zombies are slate wipers.  And Brooks should know something about the subject of zombies. His two books, plus the accompanying graphic novel The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks are all about chronicling what happens when the current world learns of a virus called “Solanum”. Anyone who is infected by this incurable disease will turn into a zombie, the sort that eats brains, is super-humanly strong, can infect others, and will of course not be affected by having limbs torn off, bones broken, etc. etc. The only “cure”, as it were, is a direct strike to the head that obliterates the brains.
And boy do the books revel in the arsenal that someone surviving the zombie apocalypse might need: the list includes M1 carbines, machetes, crowbars, monk’s spades (also known as a Shaolin spade and a noted weapon of choice of warrior monks in Chinese literature), and several types of modified firearms and ammunition, such as the combination of a SIR, or standard infantry rifle, and NATO 5.56 “Cherry PIE” bullets (pyrotechnically initiated explosive).
That’s not all, though. A zombie apocalypse would be the equivalent of those swarms of locusts that wreaked such havoc on a Biblical scale: an unstoppable force of destruction, something that could cause the end of the world as we know it. Therefore, Brooks uses World War Z in particular as a scathing commentary about the state of the world today. What happens to the world after it’s been depopulated? Who needs to be an executive or a consultant in a world that now lives a literal hand-to-mouth experience? What use is a “Shock and Awe” military strategy against opponents that cannot be shocked or awed?
These are the sorts of things that could keep people awake at night if more of them were aware of it, but that might already be the case. In the acknowledgements section of World War Z, Brooks mentions “Drs. Cohen, Whiteman, and Hayward; Professors Greenberger and Tongun; Rabbi Andy; Father Fraser; STS2SS Bordeaux (USN fmr)”. To make sure that his book would hew close to our present reality, he interviewed a whole lot of professionals across a wide range of fields – and to his astonishment, found that everyone, from hardened military lifers to doctors to clergy to – well, I don’t know, schoolteachers and actors? – had already put a serious (both amount and the opposite of “fun”) amount of thought into the subject.
We may all be sleeping better at night because other people are already working to make sure humanity survives a zombie apocalypse.
Sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Brooks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zombie_Survival_Guide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_apocalypse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombies_in_popular_culture http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WorldWarZ
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