Zombies, ladies and gentlemen, love them some brains; creamy, warm, and preferably human.
It’s the non-thinking man’s sustenance, ripped live from the steaming skull of a writhing, screaming, fighting victim, whose frontal lobe is firing with the “why me’s,” as the lower brain pumps with adrenaline and other chemical seasoning, probably making it a more delectable treat for our dead friends walking.
Brain-eating is a relatively new phenomenon in zombie lore, and really, it’s the Americanization of a monster that found its way to our shores through West Africa, the Caribbean and most notably, the voodoo rituals of Haiti.
In these cases, zombies were not the undead remnants or your neighbor or your boyfriend, half-decomposed, dragging one leg behind them, waiting for a chorus line of “Thriller” to break out. No, these were the OG undead, magically concocted and eternally sleeping under the control of a voodoo priest who kept their spirits bottled.
But that all changed with the 1954 novel “I Am Legend,” which inspired George Romero’s lo-fi masterpiece, 1968’s “The Night of the Living Dead,” the rebirth of the zombie as we know it and are obsessed by it today.
Brains? Well, they didn’t come into play as the all-consuming passion of every zombie boy and girl until widely popularized by the 1985 movie “The Return of the Living Dead.”
Since then, it’s been all brains all the time, and it’s easy to see why. Brains are pretty good and good for you if the human version shares any sort of nutritional value with their mammalian counterparts. They are relatively high in protein and calories per ounce, good for keeping that undead motor running over long periods of apocalyptic menace.
The assumption is that the real attraction of brains would be the idea of feeding on that which zombies do not have, or at least do not use. Whether under a voodoo spell or the victim of an un-deadly virus, the zombie’s own brain has been rendered pointless, devoid of responding to stimuli and unable to process anything other than the feral need to feed.
Which brings us to another issue. It’s amazing how popular zombies have become in the last half decade or so, as hot at the moment as vampires once were to every tween and teen who dreamt sweet dreams of glittery Edward and brooding Bella.
The vampire fascination is understandable; they’re smart, sexy, the top of the monster food chain and a Class 1 predator. But zombies? They’re big dumb beasts.
It’s ironic to find those who are most fascinated with zombie culture at the moment would probably categorize themselves as the independent thinkers whose interests and opinions go against the grain. Yet this zombie worship celebrates the absolute absence of independent thought, the gooey, gory legions of original lemmings, driving ignorantly into the void.
George Romero’s reimagining of the zombie — a term he didn’t even use, but later was used for his undead walkers by others — defined this mindless meat bag in a political context, whether those be the politics of governments or consumerism.
A friend reminded me that 1978’s “Dawn of the Dead” is likely a comment on consumer culture and the mindless who shop America’s malls buying “stuff,” as George Carlin might say.
Of course Romero’s “Land of the Dead” in 2005 took the mind-numbing banality of government to the literal ends of the political discussion. But it could be said that every one of his films dating back to the original were explorations of the way we simply do as we are told, question nothing and allow our lives to exist in spite of ourselves.
But this is all too heady just before Halloween, when zombie fever should be at its highest and dumbest. I like what another buddy had to say on a Facebook post when I broached this very topic earlier in the week:
“… Too deep for a Monday … Head hurting now … mustt haaveee BRRRAAAIIINNNNNSSS!!”
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