Real Zombies The Living Dead And Creatures Of The Apocalypse

Featuring 30 chilling stories of reallife zombie encounters, this comprehensive and unsettling study draws upon traditions found throughout the world to dispel common depictions of zombies as lurching, flesheating automatons made popular by countless movies and books. This fascinating collection includes the stories of the Devil Baby of Bourbon Street, a monstrous creature complete with horns and tail that still lurks in the shadows of the Big Easy; Black Mama Courteaux and the great zombie war, involving hundreds of zombie soldiers battling for the supremacy of their queen; and the swamp child of Mama Cree, who still roams the bayous of Louisiana. In addition to the stories, a variety of zombierelated facts are explored, including ceremonies and initiations, zombies throughout history, sacred zombie and voodoorelated sites, and zombies and monsters of the Bible.

Rampaging, driven, killing machines. Soulless and dead. Infected and infectious. Zombies. The epidemic of the living dead is stronger than ever in today’s pop-culture, but long before exotic viruses, biological warfare, and sinister military experiments brought the dead back to life in our cinemas and on our television screens, there were the dark spells and incantations of the ancient Egyptians, the Sumerians, and the Babylonians. Blending the historical with the modern, the biographical with the literary, the plants and animals with bacteria and viruses, the mythological with the horrifying true tales, The Zombie Book: The Encyclopedia of the Living Dead is a comprehensive resource to understanding, combating, and avoiding zombies. More than 250 entries cover everything from hit television shows, books, and movies, including The Walking Dead, World War Z and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, to zombies’ ignominious role in folklore and mythology, such as the Greek god Asclepius, ancient Voodoo religion, and the Native American Wendigo legend. The Zombie Book: The Encyclopedia of the Living Dead examines mad cow disease, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the Centers for Disease Control preparing for the end of the world, and much, much more.

Featuring 30 chilling stories of reallife zombie encounters, this comprehensive and unsettling study draws upon traditions found throughout the world to dispel common depictions of zombies as lurching, flesheating automatons made popular by countless movies and books. This fascinating collection includes the stories of the Devil Baby of Bourbon Street, a monstrous creature complete with horns and tail that still lurks in the shadows of the Big Easy; Black Mama Courteaux and the great zombie war, involving hundreds of zombie soldiers battling for the supremacy of their queen; and the swamp child of Mama Cree, who still roams the bayous of Louisiana. In addition to the stories, a variety of zombierelated facts are explored, including ceremonies and initiations, zombies throughout history, sacred zombie and voodoorelated sites, and zombies and monsters of the Bible.

"The Zombie Handbook" reveals the vital information that human readers need to know about identifying, understanding, and, when things get ugly, dispatching the "living dead."

When humankind faces what it perceives as a threat to its very existence, a macabre thing happens in art, literature, and culture: corpses begin to stand up and walk around. The dead walked in the fourteenth century, when the Black Death and other catastrophes roiled Europe. They walked in images from World War I, when a generation died horribly in the trenches. They walked in art inspired by the Holocaust and by the atomic attacks on Japan. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the dead walk in stories of the zombie apocalypse, some of the most ubiquitous narratives of post-9/11 Western culture. Zombies appear in popular movies and television shows, comics and graphic novels, fiction, games, art, and in material culture including pinball machines, zombie runs, and lottery tickets. The zombie apocalypse, Greg Garrett shows us, has become an archetypal narrative for the contemporary world, in part because zombies can stand in for any of a variety of global threats, from terrorism to Ebola, from economic uncertainty to ecological destruction. But this zombie narrative also brings us emotional and spiritual comfort. These apocalyptic stories, in which the world has been turned upside down and protagonists face the prospect of an imminent and grisly death, can also offer us wisdom about living in a community, present us with real-world ethical solutions, and invite us into conversation about the value and costs of survival. We may indeed be living with the living dead these days, but through the stories we consume and the games we play, we are paradoxically learning what it means to be fully alive.

The zombie has had a bit of a renaissance over the last decade. It seems like zombies are everywhere. From recent films like World War Z to popular TV shows like The Walking Dead, we’ve reached peak zombie saturation in American culture. Communities throughout the country hold zombie runs and races. In 2016 the first zombie-proof house was built, complete with concrete walls that move over the structure so that it’s completely sealed. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention compiled a preparedness guide “in case” of a zombie apocalypse. So what’s driving the zombie obsession in American culture? Where did the fear of this creature originate? In this eBook, The Real Zombies of Nature, we look at the myth of the zombie versus real instances of zombification in the natural world and engage in some scientific speculation about what would happen if myth ever became reality.

For nearly a century, big-screen tales of zombies have fascinated viewers, shambling their way from horror films to action thrillers and comedies. In recent years, there have even been news reports of real zombie-like behavior. But few know the truth behind Haitian folklore’s biggest contribution to global imagination. These pages get to the bottom of the origins of the zombie legend and its changes and development over time. The possible sources of “zombification,” including tropical drugs and poisons, are examined, and real stories of zombies are debunked. Real or not, zombies have invaded pop culture and there’s no escape.

Zombies first shuffled across movie screens in 1932 in the low-budget Hollywood film White Zombie and were reimagined as undead flesh-eaters in George A. Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead almost four decades later. Today, zombies are omnipresent in global popular culture, from video games and top-rated cable shows in the United States to comic books and other visual art forms to low-budget films from Cuba and the Philippines. The zombie’s ability to embody a variety of cultural anxieties—ecological disaster, social and economic collapse, political extremism—has ensured its continued relevance and legibility, and has precipitated an unprecedented deluge of international scholarship. Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities but also beyond, spreading into sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and even epidemiology. Zombie Theory collects the best interdisciplinary zombie scholarship from around the world. Essays portray the zombie not as a singular cultural figure or myth but show how the undead represent larger issues: the belief in an afterlife, fears of contagion and technology, the effect of capitalism and commodification, racial exclusion and oppression, dehumanization. As presented here, zombies are not simple metaphors; rather, they emerge as a critical mode for theoretical work. With its diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, Zombie Theory thinks through what the walking undead reveal about our relationships to the world and to each other. Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Samuel Byrnand, U of Canberra; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U; Jean Comaroff, Harvard U; John Comaroff, Harvard U; Edward P. Comentale, Indiana U; Anna Mae Duane, U of Connecticut; Karen Embry, Portland Community College; Barry Keith Grant, Brock U; Edward Green, Roosevelt U; Lars Bang Larsen; Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky U; Elizabeth McAlister, Wesleyan U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; David McNally, York U; Tayla Nyong’o, Yale U; Simon Orpana, U of Alberta; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Ola Sigurdson, U of Gothenburg; Jon Stratton, U of South Australia; Eugene Thacker, The New School; Sherryl Vint, U of California Riverside; Priscilla Wald, Duke U; Tyler Wall, Eastern Kentucky U; Jen Webb, U of Canberra; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.