THE LIVING DEAD

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it. —W. Somerset Maugham

After teaching a class at the University of Pittsburgh one crisp, autumn day I walked around a corner and was attacked by a zombie. It's probably not what you think; there was no biting, moaning, or hacking. The zombie just mistook me for a human.

Humans vs. Zombies (HvZ) is a game of moderated tag being played by tens of thousands of people, particularly college students, all over the world. Games involve strategy and teamwork and take a few days to complete. Bandanas indicate participation—on the arm for a human, on the head or neck for a zombie. Since the creation of HvZ in 2005, the phenomenon has grown so much that student clubs and organizations dedicated to it already exist on campuses around the globe.

Pittsburgh is a fitting setting for zombie mayhem, since, after all, the modern popularity of the living dead can be traced to George Romero's cult classic movie Night of the Living Dead, filmed in the 'Burgh in 1968. With that film, Romero revolutionized an entire genre and converted zombies from the more traditional witch-doctor victims they had long been into flesh-eating hunters. Eventually, human brains became the entrée of choice for these monsters, and more than forty years later, the undead continue to draw in viewers and consumers by the millions.

Books, movies, and video games drive zombie zeal in the twenty-first century. We just can't get enough of them these days. Thanks to the internet, a massive zombie subculture exists across a variety of websites and social media networks. There are even plans for a zombie musical as Broadway producers have already secured the rights to Michael Jackson's "Thriller". The American government even got in on the hype in May 2011 when the Centers for Disease Control released a Zombie Apocalypse preparation guide as a clever gimmick to raise awareness for appropriate responses to natural disasters. Reaction to the humorous ploy was so overwhelming that the website crashed for a few hours.

Like the creatures at the heart of this phenomenon, the popularity of undead creatures doesn't seem to be dying anytime soon. Well, technically zombies are already dead, but that's the problem. You can whack off their arms or put one in their chest and they'll just keep marching toward you like they were strolling down the aisle in a grocery store.

We are compelled by beings that can't be stopped by death. This attraction makes a bit more sense with something like vampires, who are increasingly portrayed as romantic, beautiful, and heroic. That's quite a different thing than zombies, which represent only decay and death and are considered to be completely beyond redemption. On the surface, the popularity of horrible creatures that are frightening, gruesome, and evil doesn't make much sense. Yet the undead generate billions of dollars in revenue worldwide.

ZOMBIES IN THE MIRROR

What do we see in a zombie that's so compelling? The short and perhaps surprising answer is that we see ourselves. Zombies were people once. They were humans who ate Skittles and had babies and danced badly at weddings. They drank coffee, shopped for bedding, downloaded music, blew out birthday candles, and attended church. This familiarity is seen in the way they're dressed: frightening ghouls wearing bathrobes and name tags and Dockers. When we see them ambling down the street, we fear them and imagine how close we are to becoming them at the same time. Other monsters are different since we usually don't understand where they came from or what they even are, but we know exactly what zombies are: regular people who didn't stay dead. Ultimately, we project ourselves onto monsters because it helps make sense out of our human nature.

We also see one another in zombies. Relationships drive zombie stories, and they are filled with friends, siblings, spouses, and parents who can transition from loved ones to enemies in seconds. We're compelled by the idea of a loved one becoming a deadly enemy so quickly. In 28 Days Later, one of my favorites, a likable character named Frank is accidentally infected by the "rage" virus, which takes effect very quickly. Frank realizes instantly that he's been infected and has only seconds to tell his teenage daughter, Hannah, that he loves her while trying to stagger away and not hurt anyone. In an instant he goes from protector to threat, and his friend Jim is suddenly faced with the terrifying task of doing whatever must be done to stop one of the few people left in the world to care about. It's not just imagining what we would do if grandma or hubby suddenly became a flesh-eating monster. It's about betrayal, a piercing emotional hit by someone we trust.

We also see zombies in us. We're self-centered in that we only get one narrow perspective through which to process reality. Call us self-focused if that erases the sting a bit. We simply look at ourselves more than anyone else. We want to like what we see, but that's usually not the case, so we present versions of ourselves that will appeal to the rest of the world. Those public masks may fool the people around us, but it's a different story when we look in the mirror. Truth always claws its way out of our hearts. Those dark parts of who we can be when we're at our worst can repulse us like decay-riddled zombies. Zombies represent complete depravity, pure evil, the worst a person can become. They offer nothing but death. They have no hope. We cheer for their destruction because conquering evil is good. And when we applaud the end of such evil, a part of us feels vindicated as though the darkest parts of us can be overcome.

But we also see other things in these fearsome creatures. One of their most striking features is that they, in a sense, conquer the grave. At the very least, death does not stop them. If we fear death, then what do we make of someone who can't be stopped by it? Any being with that kind of power gets our attention.

Ironically, living-dead beings like zombies are a cultural phenomenon because they reflect something that's true about people, both who we think we are and who we actually are. Observing them opens a window into how we think about mortality, eternity, and life as we know it, and that's what this book aims to do: explore issues of life, death, and life after death.

THE UNDEAD ARE DAMNED

I'm guessing that most of us today don't contemplate the possibility of eternal damnation each morning while sipping on coffee and munching on cereal. I mean, on Mondays maybe, but every day is just overdoing it. It's hard for us in the twenty-first century to understand what a preoccupation that concept was for most people in earlier centuries. As I study and teach the first few thousand years of Western civilization I'm struck by how focused those societies...