I admit it freely and loudly, I LOVE ZOMBIES! No I do not mean physically love them, I simply love to read, ingest (pardon the pun) and watch everything zombie. My love of the zombie universe stems from my early childhood, where I had the beegeebers scared out of my by a movie called “The Invisible Invaders”, which later spawned the TV series “The Invaders”.  The TV series did not do any justice to the movie, but was somewhat enjoyable to watch.

My interest increased over the years with the classic most everyone has seen or at least heard of “Night of the Living Dead”. This movie was one of the fore runners of some of us zombie lovers basic tenets of what a zombie really is made up of.

Basically the idea that zombies are the dead coming back or brought back to life, low intelligence, slow moving and jerky movements, hard to kill, and a desire for human flesh are all explored in this classic.

The zombie world has expanded into many other facets, some of which I will explore in this writing. One thing can be said, zombies come in most any color, size, feature, or even taste (my license to the absurd).

What is a zombie? Most people think of zombies as the creatures I discussed from the classsic movie, however you might make a point to say vampires fall into the realm of zombism. They are dead (in many cases referred to as “the living dead”, they drink the blood of human beings (eat their liquids), and are somewhat difficult to kill depending on which story you are reading at the time, IE:stake in the heart, sunlight,holy water (can kill in volume, but only burns in smaller quantities)and maybe even  cutting off the head.

Some of these especially cutting off the head will work with the normal everyday zombie, but for arguments sake we will stay with basic zombies at the moment.

The zombie can be created by some sort of virus, a bite by the infected, radiation (though I rarely see this as a cause) mystical chants (usually when relating to backward natives and their rituals), ingested materials (such as toxic chemicals) and in some cases laboratory experiments that have gone wrong (or right depending on y0ur point of view I guess).

Zombies can live on for various lengths of time if you want to call it living, again depending on the storyline. They can somehow continue to function for months, years or maybe even decades or centuries. I prefer to think of them as slowly rotting away, piece by piece until they have no real pieces left.

In the movie “28 days later”, the zombies are created from a lab expirement on monkees that is loosed on the world by hippie agitators against the cruelty of the corporations using them in their studies. These zombies are actually technically still alive but diseased with the “Rage” virus (made as a military weapon to destabilize the opposing’s sides population. So these particular zombies are still attempting to stay “alive” through their attacks on living beings and their taste for human knoshes. In the end of the movie the zombies are shown to be “dying” off from starvation.

The newer series of “Night of the Living Dead” movies which include “Day of the Dead”, Dawn of the Dead, Island of the Dead, and others the zombies are faster and in most cases more deadly than in the original movie. This leads to the question, “DO you prefer fast or slow zombies in your movies?”. I really do not care as long as they make them at least somewhat believable.