The reclassification of zombies

[Miisa]

Inspired by a discussion JoeP and I had on the phone after his post on the 10000-year old zombies, I still felt it best to start a new thread on this important topic, as it is less history, or even popular culture (maybe science?) than pressing matters of general interest and deserved its own topic.


The consensus (or my argument anyway) is that there needs to be a reclassification of possibly undead lumbering creatures who chase you in hordes and try to eat or at least bite you. Lumping them all together is completely uncharacteristic of humanity which goes out of its way to classify every beetle with slightly off colouration as its own species. They should of course also have their own names. Modern fiction writers appear to have grasped this important fact by avoiding the z-word altogether in such works as The Walking Dead.
There are several types, three spring to mind right away, though I could be missing some.

1: The Haitian Zombie. May or may not be supernatural, could be further divided into
a. Dead people raised from the dead and controlled by voodooesque priests
b. People drugged and presumed dead, only to be used as slaves by voodooesque priests.

2: The risen from the dead ghoulish supernatural beings, possibly actually previous dead risen from their graves, certainly those who are bitten and die of the subsequent infection and are re-animated. These creatures are effectively immortal, as long as the brain is intact, as starvation, disease, blood loss or limb/body loss seems not to faze them in any way. Can possibly be further separated into
a. slow
b. fast

3: The infected people who never really died, but are rather acting under the influence of some virus (rabies-like, if you will) to spread the infection as much as possible until they also do die.
a: These actually have died, but something seems to reanimate them. A little less interesting as it tends to pull supernatural elements in and blend with type 2 to produce eternal walkers.
b: Pure medical/sciency mind control viruses or fungi. Usually always fatal after aggressive transmission phase

Also, brain-eating makes no sense from a biological perspective if the pathogen resides in the brain, as it would try to make the subject infect others, but leave brains as intact as possible. Therefore the "Braiiiins!" zombie is completely unrealistic.

[Watser?]

Type 1a-1: Jamaican zombies:
Dread people raised from the dread and controlled by evil soundsystems.

[Dingfod]

Type 1, subset A: Hatian zombies, they're just really angry with the non-zombies because they've had a bit of bad luck with that whole being alive thing.

[JoeP]

I don't see the poll.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Miisa

Inspired by a discussion JoeP and I had on the phone after his post on the 10000-year old zombies, I still felt it best to start a new thread on this important topic, as it is less history, or even popular culture (maybe science?) than pressing matters of general interest and deserved its own topic.

Pressing matters of national and civil defence, public health, and the preservation of law and order!

Originally Posted by Miisa

The consensus (or my argument anyway)

Originally Posted by Miisa

Can possibly be further separated into
a. slow
b. fast

Exactly. Why are there no normal-speed zombies? That would provide better cover and disguise whether they are trying to infect others or simply eat people.

Wait ... maybe there are ... and their disguise is almost perfect

Originally Posted by Miisa

Also, brain-eating makes no sense from a biological perspective if the pathogen resides in the brain, as it would try to make the subject infect others, but leave brains as intact as possible. Therefore the "Braiiiins!" zombie is completely unrealistic.

Additionally, eating someone's brain tends to make them dead. And not undead. I think realism is not the primary criterion we should be applying ...

Clearly, "Braaaiiins!" zombies are turned by having their own brains eaten, and although they no longer need them they then have a futile compulsion to restore their powers of thinking by eating other people's brains.

[JoeP]

Now, to the important matter of attaching the right word to each class of "zombie".

Prof Miisa's assertion is that the true zombie is strictly the Haitian version (popularly if wrongly associated with voodoo/vodou). And that "ghoul" is a better term for walking corpses. However, my understanding of ghoul as generally used is that while they have zombie-like behaviours they aren't reanimated humans but supernatural beings of some other race.

Wikipedia led me to the term revenants (not the French word as used in the recent series Les Revenants) which matches pretty well the current pop meaning of zombie:

"It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony".

and has the advantage of being a cool word. However, both this article and Revenants in fiction try to draw distinctions between revenants and zombies.


Q:
Should artificially reanimated corpses / assembled bits of corpses by "scientists" such as Dr Frankenstein or Herbert West be included in the classification?

[Watser?]

Ghoul comes from the Arabic and refers to a specific type of monster in Arabian folklore:

Ghouls (Arabic: غول‎ ‹See Tfd›ghūl) are desert-dwelling, shapeshifting demons that can assume the guise of animal, especially hyenas. They lure unwary travellers into the desert wastes to slay and devour them. These creatures also prey on young children, rob graves, drink blood, and eat the dead, taking on the form of the one they previously ate.

Arabian mythology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I guess that explains why people would mistake them for zombies.

[godfry n. glad]

So...Where does the Christian Jesus fit into this categorization?

Just because he doesn't chant "Braaaains" and has not yet mastered "When the Saints Come Marching In" by blowing through his hands, does that mean he doesn't qualify as a zombie? Or, is he just a ghoul?

[Ymir's blood]

Brain eating zombies come from the Return of the Living Dead series. They were created by a chemical and were in constant pain. These zombies were actually still aware of their surroundings and one explained that brains had some property that eased the pain when eaten.

Revenants tended to be more powerful with magic abilities and incredible physical strength. They were roughly analogous to the Norse draugr or folkloric vampires.

[Miisa]

Originally Posted by Ymir's blood

Brain eating zombies come from the Return of the Living Dead series. They were created by a chemical and were in constant pain. These zombies were actually still aware of their surroundings and one explained that brains had some property that eased the pain when eaten.

Revenants tended to be more powerful with magic abilities and incredible physical strength. They were roughly analogous to the Norse draugr or folkloric vampires.

I appreciate the roots behind the brain-eating, but their inclusion into the entire mythos in a cross-group way is unacceptable. The illogical/dissonant aspects that would cause with some sub-groups make all zombies look bad and possibly even downright unrealistic.

Suggestions on new names if the established ones won't fit?

[Stormlight]

I'm not at all surprised by this attitude. As a matter of fact it illustrates the institutionalized racism of certain parts of the freethought (haha) talk forum and chat emporium which is accepted when directed against the brain-eating members of the zombie family.

You should be ashamed of yourselves, Mr. Miisa et al.

[Kyuss Apollo]

So 10,000 year old zombies are a real possibility. But what about orcs? If they are indeed former elves twisted and perverted by the malice of Morgoth, shouldn't they too be immortal? Are there some especially old orcs still lurking about that were alive in the First Age?

And where would these orcs go when they die? Utumno? Thangorodrim? Is there a special room in the Halls of Mandos for them? Do they ever join their with their zombie elven cousins and all sing Kumbaya or Deck the Halls?

And anyone who intimates that this post contributes to the derailing of this thread is clearly racist.

Orcs ARE people too, you know.

[Janet]

That quotation about revenants is from Calmet, right? Revenant is usually used for vampire, although in pretty much everywhere except Romania and Russia vampires were mindless husks like the post-Romero zombie.

As for naming the subset, I suggest using the creator or franchise names. Romero zombies are slow cannibals. Return zombies eat brains. 28 Days zombies are fast. And Cemetery Man zombies will be eaten by whomever they chose.

[Qingdai]

All this classification stuff, we all know (in cultural anthropology of the zombie AKA persons of non-life) that there was much mixing between types and behaviors, due to various factors and cultural over-lap. If you'd all just get over your Great Men of Zombie History fallacy, you'd realize what's really interesting is current Zombie Culture, for example they apparently like Salsa.

Meridian Brothers - Salsa del Zombie (Perseguido...

[Vivisectus]

We also have the re-animator style zombies who are not infectious, and who have been re-animated through the extraction of their "essence" in a quasi-scientific way. They are not quite as out of it, but they are quite intensely insane.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Janet

As for naming the subset, I suggest using the creator or franchise names. Romero zombies are slow cannibals. Return zombies eat brains. 28 Days zombies are fast. And Cemetery Man zombies will be eaten by whomever they chose.

And Linux zombies can be identified by a 'Z' in the STAT column.

[ceptimus]

In Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the subtle knife is a man-made tool that can create either by accident or design, 'Specters'.

Specters are described as 'creatures of pure amoral evil' and 'children of the abyss'. Specters feed on the souls or dæmons of people, leaving them soulless zombies. However these dæmonless people are not infectious to others - they are merely the objects of great pity and the cause of immense sadness.

[Vivisectus]

A lot of them also have two subcategories: ones that walk or shuffle about, and ones that lie still looking like they are un-animated dead until someone gets close to dramatically pounce for a quick scare during boring moments.

[Miisa]

I kind of always assumed they go into a sort of energy-saving stasis when there isn't much going on, hence the stillness and sudden action.

We need a David Attenborough of zombie observation in the wild to tell us these things definitively.

[Vivisectus]

I think we should systematize based on their distinctive features, and then we can see if we cannot create a classification system. Obviously this will have to be done the old-fashioned way, as we cannot use genetics to differentiate the different species.

I propose that we call the infectious type of Zombie that involves dead humans coming back to life as Zombi Romeronis, since Romero developed the archetype of this type of zombie. These zombies

1: Start as infected living people who die and are then transformed into zombies
2: Have highly infectious bites that carry a lethal disease that kills, generally within 48 hours
3: Can be damaged, but not killed unless the brain is destroyed
4: Are generally slow and shambling

Zombi Romeronis Romeronis, is the archetype of this kind of zombie. They seem to retain some vague, "instinctual" memories of their previous lives. They walk about in a shambling, uncoordinated way and utter bestial grunts and groans much of the time. They are one of the slower types of zombies: I do not think I have seen them sprint or jump.

Romeronis Romeronis is in many cases a much more intelligent zombie than your average shambling undead, sometimes even capable of almost human emotions, and capable of learning or of using experience from their non-undead existence to get to food.

In later movies, rare zombies display behavior that could arguably justify giving them a further classification: "Zombi Romeronis Romeronis Sapiens", who seem to display more-than-rudimentary problem solving skills, can learn from observation quite quickly, and even seem to care about what happens to other zombies and to influence the actions of other zombies.

Zombi Romeronis Perambulatus such as seen in "The walking dead" is another subtype of these. Much more like automata and seemingly devoid of anything but the most rudimentary intelligence, this zombie staggers about slowly most of the time, but is occasionally capable of a short burst of speed, a lunge, or a pounce.

The disease that causes this kind of zombie-ism has 2 types: the acute deadly form that kills, and a latent form that can be carried without clear symptoms, but which will cause the carrier to become a zombie after death. Or possibly these are actually 2 distinct afflictions?

There are also 2 distinct behavior patterns: mobile opportunistic hunting, or static ambush hunting.

The mobile type reacts strongly to noises, seems to have fairly poor eyesight, and rather bad coordination and speed, although hey are capable of brief burst of a jogging run when excited and close to food.

However, sometimes we have seen inactive lurking zombies in situations where there is plenty of sound and activity: in the episode where the veterinary loses his leg they run over what seems to be a corpse after a noisy fight.

It can be that some choose to be ambush predators rather than actively roaming opportunistic hunters, or that we are dealing with 2 different types.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Miisa

We need a David Attenborough of zombie observation in the wild to tell us these things definitively.

A major new BBC unnatural world series: Undeath on Earth.

[Ymir's blood]

I haven't seen the remakes, but in the original Romero films, there wasn't an infection that caused zombiehood. Everyone who died would come back unless the head was destroyed beforehand. The bite was fatal, but it wasn't ever specified if that was due to venom or infection. Of course, the bite being fatal did lead to zombiehood but the same could be said of gunshot wounds.

[Vivisectus]

That's true - I am basing my classification largely on the later movies, where the bites seemed to lead to a disease, and there was very little evidence of anyone who was buried or put in a morgue roaming about: just people who had been bitten and / or killed by zombies.

Perhaps we should stick purely to the behavior

[Janet]

Let me try this.

Zombi Romeronis Dellamore Dellamorte slow to average speed zombies, unless they're on a motorcycle. Eat human flesh but not specifically brains. Retain some knowledge and intelligence. Infection caused by a plant that grows in a particular cemetery.

[Ymir's blood]