Whether you call them walkers, creepers or deadies, zombies have infiltrated all forms of media with a fumbling vengeance. Some movies are good; some shows are better, but everywhere you look you see them. Theyre re-enacting Jane Austen stories and fighting pea shooting plants. Theyre hanging out at amusement parks and harassing fire fighters. No matter what theyre doing or where they are, they have some standard features. One can expect to see rotting flesh, a wobbling walk and usually some missing body parts. They are slow moving corpses focused on eating living humans, particularly their limbs and intestines. Theyre described as the walking dead, being reanimated after death like some kind of dispensationalist Apocalypse. Sometimes, its because hell is full, or because a witch doctor curses a poor lost man, or maybe its just because the dead stumbling around is gross and a little scary, even if it doesnt make any sense. The better movies and comics juxtapose zombie outbreaks against the remnants of human society to force us to ethically examine human behaviour in stressful situations. How do you solve the problem of the walking dead and how does humanity survive? Replace zombies with nuclear technology, Ebola or a really big volcanic eruption and you have a realistic problem that people must face. Zombies fill in for any of those in a more gory and frightening way. Plus, they can be shot, stabbed, zapped, axed, burned and kicked in the face. Good luck kicking Ebola in the face. Still, zombies just dont make any sense. Their structure, their behaviour and peoples inability to avoid them is just preposterous. So, lets start with basic forensics and well get to some poop jokes eventually
