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How the zombie represents America’s deepest fears

A sociopolitical history of zombies, from Haiti to The Walking Dead.

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The zombie, by its physical nature, inspires fear.

It is gray-skinned and bloodied, missing a limb or an eyeball. It lurches forward in tattered clothing, arms reaching out for supple flesh. Among a sea of gaunt, gangling bodies, it hobbles over its own intestines and chatters its decaying teeth.

But looking back at the history of the zombie in American culture, from its entry into our consciousness to The Walking Dead , the creature is more than an aesthetic horror — it is a form of political commentary.

For 80 years, the undead have been used by filmmakers and writers as a metaphor for much deeper fears: racial sublimation, atomic destruction, communism, mass contagion, globalism — and, more than anything, each other.

From Haiti to Hollywood: fear of voodoo and primitive culture

Though various concepts of the dead rising date back thousands of years in many different cultural variations, the American depiction of the zombie was borrowed from 19th-century Haitian voodooism.

The rural Haitian spiritual belief system — which was largely formulated by the millions of West African slaves the French brought to the country in the 17th century — held that those who died from an unnatural cause like murder would “linger” at their graves. During this time, the corpse would be susceptible to being revived by a bokor, or witch doctor, who would keep it as a personal slave, granting it no agency. The Haitians called this creature — suspended in some ambiguous state between life and death — a zombi .

After staging a successful slave rebellion and gaining independence from France in 1804, Haiti was demonized by the Western world as a threat to imperialism. Voodoo culture was perceived to be a signifier of the country’s “ savage inferiority ” — and when the United States occupied Haiti in 1915 , Catholic missionaries set out to dismantle it.

It was during this occupation that an American by the name of William Seabrook was made aware of the zombi.

While researching voodoo in Port-au-Prince, Seabrook was taken to the Haitian American Sugar Company, where he was introduced to four “zombies.” In a late 1920s text , he recounted the moment:

“The supposed zombies continued dumbly at work. They were plodding like brutes, like automatons. The eyes were the worst . … They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind but staring, unfocused, unseeing.”

The catatonic beings before Seabrook’s eyes were most certainly slaves employed by American manufacturers, made to work 18-hour shifts and living in squalid conditions. But Seabrook, ignorant to this, sensationalized the account in his 1929 book The Magic Island — and in doing so, exposed America to the zombie.

The first zombie film — White Zombie (1932) — was released at the onset of the American horror movie genre, just one year after Dracula and Frankenstein. Largely based on Seabrook’s accounts, it came out at the tail end of the Haitian occupation.

In the film, a white couple visits Haiti, where they plan to get married. A plantation owner falls in love with the woman and, enlisting the help of a voodoo master, transforms the woman into a zombie. A dastardly plot ensues, involving multiple “zombifications” at the hands of evil Haitians — but in the end, the white couple emerges unharmed, and the voodoo master is pushed off a cliff to his death.

White Zombie explicitly stoked America’s worst fears of voodooism and turned the spiritual belief system into a horror motif. Haiti is presented as a primitive, orderless place where witchcraft and zombies run rampant. The ultimate tradition of Western religion, marriage, is savaged by the dark magic of the uncivilized world.

The film was a box office success, sparking a slew of similar, voodoo-fear-inducing zombie films in the 1930s and ’40s.

In Ouanga (1936), a female Haitian plantation owner falls in love with a white man and uses voodoo to conjure two black zombies, who capture the man’s fiancée for a sacrificial voodoo ceremony. Her plan eventually fails, and she is strangled to death by a “noble” black servant. I Walked With a Zombie (1943), which features a white nurse who goes to the Caribbean and has a series of wildly primitive hallucinations about zombies, explores the psychological fears of voodoo.

Until the 1940s, zombies were largely a reflection of the fears of voodooism and blackness. But as the political landscape of America shifted, the creatures soon acquired new symbolism.

The atomic zombie: fear of nuclear extinction and the Red Scare

By 1940, the zombie had staggered from a little-known piece of Haitian folklore to a widespread cultural phenomenon in America. Zombies were the créature du jour in big band songs , radio programs , and nightclub routines. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the “ Zombie ” — a cocktail made with rum (and sugarcane tilled by Haitian slaves) — was a huge hit.

It was also a time of great fear: World War II was emerging, and would bring with it mass genocide, atomic warfare, and the threat of communist dictatorships. The ensuing Cold War reinvigorated anxieties over Soviet communism and scientific advancements, like the space race.

Zombies became an integral part of how Americans grappled with these fears.

At first, we see fears of voodoo and espionage clash in zombie films. In King of the Zombies (1941), a pilot crashes in the Caribbean and comes across a foreign spy who is using zombies to coax war intelligence from a US admiral. Likewise, in Revenge of the Zombies (1943), an evil doctor creates an army of Nazi zombies to ensure a German victory.

But following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and the first Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949, American fears of nuclear radiation and communism began to manifest in zombies.

The comic Corpses: Coast to Coast , published in a 1954 issue of Voodoo , is a prime example of this.

In the strip, gravediggers form a union and go on strike, causing a massive buildup of unburied corpses. A Soviet communist then sends the corpses through an “indoctrination tank” (which mutates them into zombies), and forms a coalition called United World Zombies (U.W.Z.). One by one, U.W.Z. takes over the White House, the United States, Europe, and the world. But the entire uprising is ultimately quelled by an atomic bomb: “Zombie tissue doesn’t stand up well to radiation!” the comic’s antagonist yells out in the final panels.

We see similar plots play out in Hollywood’s zombie films. Creature W ith the Atom Brain (1955), features an ex-Nazi scientist named Wilhelm using radiation to reanimate corpses. In Teenage Zombies (1960), a “scientist from the East” intends to zombify everyone in the United States using an experimental gas.

All the while, the Soviet Union was winning the s pace r ace : In 1957 it launched Sputnik, (the world’s first artificial satellite), and in 1961 it sent the first human into space. Zombies were used as a mode of expressing Americans’ fears of losing ground in the space frontier — and the fear of space itself.

Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952) revolves around an evil alien force that steals atomic bomb plans from the Soviets, with the intention of using its force to swap orbital positions with Earth. In Plan 9 F rom Outer Space (1959), benevolent aliens resurrect a human zombie force and use it to stop the development of a sun-powered mega bomb. The Earth Dies Screaming (1964) features a bulletproof alien force that uses a strange gas to obliterate mankind, then animates corpses with radio signals.

By the mid- to late 1960s, new turmoil emerged in the United States, and with it, the modern zombie was born.

The apocalypse zombie: a response to civil rights and the Vietnam War

The 1960s — rife with assassinations, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and counterculture rebellion — were among American history’s most turbulent years.

In the midst of it all came a movie that entirely changed the zombie film as we know it: Night of the Living Dead .

George Romero’s 1968 epic begins with a young woman named Barbara arriving at a cemetery to lay a wreath on her grandfather’s grave. A zombie stumbles forth, and she runs through the countryside, taking refuge in a farmhouse. Here, she encounters a young black man named Ben and a small group of other survivors. Ben avoids an onslaught of hundreds of zombies and emerges as the house’s sole survivor, only to be shot and killed in the final scene by a white Southern police officer.

Released just five months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Night of the Living Dead teems with political undertones that address the nation’s turbulent race relations.

Racially charged interactions are woven throughout the film — mainly between Ben and Harry, a white authoritarian whose power is increasingly threatened. When Tom, a young idealist in the group, interjects with the line , “We’d all be a lot better off if all three of us were working together,” he is largely ignored.

The closing credits of the film are a series of still, grainy images, in which a mob of white Southerners puncture Ben’s lifeless body with meat hooks, then pose for photos. As the final shot fixates on a raging fire reminiscent of a Ku Klux Klan ritual, we hear the sound of barking police dogs echo in the distance.

“The film was a direct response to cultural events,” says Roger Luckhurst, author of Zombies: A Cultural History . “It was shown to inner-city, mostly black youth, and paired as a double feature with Slaves (1969) — a film about an 1850s slave rebellion. It was shown in Greenwich Village among radical student groups, and was showcased in the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a form of political filmmaking.”

Night of the Living Dead was also revolutionary in that it was the first prominent film to feature vast hordes of zombies (in the film, they are referred to as “ghouls”), as opposed to an isolated few — and to use those hordes as a symbol of an impending apocalypse.

For the first time, many Americans were being exposed to the wide-scale horrors of war. Graphic video footage of the Tet Offensive (1968) and piles of dead bodies were routinely broadcast. The “massification” of the zombie in Romero’s film is a nod to this.

Toward the end of the film, in a television broadcast, the anchor reports that a “search and destroy” method will be used to take down the zombies. This seems to be a reference to the method employed by US troops against the Viet Cong — a method that used “body count” to measure the success of an attack, rather than strategic efficiency.

Despite the social progress of the 1960s, the nation’s wealth distribution became increasingly unequal in the ’70s and ’80s.

While zombie films slipped into an era of exploitation and low-budget groaners, Romero’s follow-up, Dawn of the Dead (1978) recrystallized the genre as a potent form of social commentary — this time, shifting his target to late-stage American capitalism.

Here, a zombie apocalypse rakes the United States, leaving urban centers — largely populated by lower-class minorities — especially vulnerable. SWAT teams bust through the doors of housing projects, killing dozens of living humans who pose a potential infection risk. Survivors take refuge in a giant shopping mall, where they “enjoy a hedonistic lifestyle” — but a gang of bikers soon breaks in and loots the place, in the process letting in thousands of zombies.

In the final moments of the film, zombies overrun the mall — escalators on, music playing, fountains gurgling — and we see little difference between a typical holiday weekend shopping crowd and a zombie apocalypse.

The zombies in Dawn of the Dead underscore the fears of capitalism and mindless consumption that racked the late 1970s. Here, the zombies are consumers, aimlessly roaming through shops: “This was an important place in their lives,” one survivor comments on the zombies’ presence in the mall. But the survivors are just as guilty, as is evident in this exchange between the film’s protagonists:

ROGER: Well, we're in [the mall], but how the hell are we gonna get back? PETER: Who the hell cares? Let's go shopping! ROGER: Watches! Watches! PETER: “Let's just get the stuff we need. I'll get a television and a radio.” ROGER: Ooh, ooh, lighter fluid! And chocolate! Chocolate! PETER: [Running down a clothing aisle] Hey, how about a mink coat?!

“Having been essentially brainwashed by capitalist ideology, the [survivors] cannot see the shattered world around them in any terms other than those of possession and consumption,” writes film studies professor Kyle William Bishop . “And this misplaced drive ultimately proves strong enough to put all their lives in jeopardy.”

The pandemic zombie: fear of mass contagion

Beginning in the 1980s, a fear of global contagion consumed the minds of Americans.

Over several decades, the world had witnessed a number of major, previously unidentified viruses: Ebola was detected in Sudan in 1976, AIDS manifested itself in the 1980s, the avian flu broke out in China in the mid-’90s, and SARS sent global shockwaves in 2003. Fears of “devastating epidemics” prompted the World Health Organization to establish a detailed preparation infrastructure.

These contagion fears — like all fears before it — were swiftly integrated into the zombies’ sense of being: An early 1986 article about AIDS in the Journal of the American Medical Association was titled “Night of the Living Dead II.”

Contagion soon joined the ranks of voodoo and radiation as an explanation for how zombies are reanimated.

In the widely popular video game Resident Evil (1996), a major pharmaceutical company, the Umbrella Corporation, secretly experiments with bio-organic weaponry and develops the "T-virus" — a mutagenic virus that brings corpses back to life. A “green flu” virus is to blame for zombies in the plot of the 2008 video game Left 4 Dead.

The film 28 Days Later (2002) follows a similar arc: Apes infected with a highly contagious, rage-inducing virus escape from a medical research lab, and the infection spreads throughout the world, resulting in a dystopian collapse.

In recent years, the zombie — and its new medically induced origins — has been appropriated by hardcore survivalists.

In 2011, Steven Schlozman , a Harvard neurobiologist, released The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks From the Apocalypse , in which he presented a “realistic” zombie scenario, farcically based on scientific “evidence.” He even coined a name for the zombie contagion: Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency syndrome (A.N.S.D.).

That same year, the C enters for Disease Control and Prevention famously released "Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse" — a guide on how to prepare for a widespread epidemic outbreak. The campaign was so wildly popular that it was expanded into a blog, promotional posters, and a novella. "You may laugh now,” writes the CDC’s preparedness director, Ali S. Khan, “but if a [zombie apocalypse] happens you'll be happy you read this."

In both cases, a small contingency of the public — no doubt, those with very real fears of apocalyptic doom — took the ideas of Schlozman and the CDC very seriously.

After pulling an Orson Welles and jokingly passing off his theories as truth on a national radio program, Schlozman got inundated with terror-stricken letters from listeners. “The show generated a ripple of genuine concern,” he recalled . “Mails showed up in my in-box, and I got questions along the lines of: What’s the best medicine to stave off the zombie infection? How do I keep my house safe from the zombie onslaught?”

Similarly, the CDC’s communications director related that most of the genuine responses he received were inquiries about weapon recommendations to stave off zombies.

The idea that mass contagion could start a zombie apocalypse was soon appropriated by a new survivalism fantasy — one predicated on ample weaponry, rugged individualism, and a fear of globalization.

The post-apocalyptic zombie: fear of each other

In 2013, an interesting civilian army popped up in the Midwest: t he Kansas Anti Zombie Militia.

“Can a natural person change into this monster that many fear?” Alfredo Carbajal, the militia’s spokesperson, inquired . “The possibilities are yes, it can happen. We have seen incidents that are very close to it, and we are thinking it is more possible than people think.”

The militia’s members, who grew up on movies like 28 Days Later and video games like Left 4 Dead, deeply fear the “global pandemic” zombie — and their preparation strategy rests largely on guns (though Carbajal recommends a blunt object, like a bat or a baton, to kill a zombie). A number of other militias — including a faction of the Michigan Militia — have followed suit, using the pandemic-themed zombie apocalypse as justification for gun rights.

These militias’ dialogue is indicative of the latest zombie trend. Today’s storylines critique the tenets of right-wing survivalism: rugged independence, a hands-off government, and guns.

In The Walking Dead (2010 to present) — a television show based on a comic of the same name — presents a post-apocalyptic hellscape, where “walkers” (zombies) are the least of the survivors’ problems.

Over the series’ seven (and counting) seasons, the protagonists are constantly imperiled by other survivors: groups of armed bandits, psychotic cult leaders, biker gangs, and thugs.

The post-apocalyptic world is dotted with tribes interested only in their own self-preservation; all other life is considered disposable. After a particularly gruesome clash between two survivor communities in season six, a bearded man named Jesus scans piles of freshly massacred bodies and murmurs, “So this is what the New World looks like.” Indeed, it does.

Author Roger Luckhurst attributes this inability to cooperate to the survivors’ “deeply conservative value of ‘defending your own.’”

Nobody exemplifies this better than The Walking Dead ’s Daryl Dixon , a self-proclaimed redneck who “makes racism lovable.” Daryl is at once fiercely loyal to those like him and staunchly independent. He maintains an off-the-grid mentality, relies on nobody, and is never caught without his crossbow, a gun, and at least three knives. He is the embodiment of the “Don’t Tread on Me” Southern mentality.

A recent film, Range 15 , takes this value system to an extreme: Five military buddies — each outfitted with absurd amounts of ammo and patriotic paraphernalia — proceed to “take names and kick ass” for 92 minutes, absolving America of its foreign, unfamiliar zombie threat.

Zombies, by nature, grapple with the fear of losing agency. But these stories are just as much about the fantasy for regaining it. A hygienic collapse brings with it truly horrific consequences, but also, in the eyes of a certain faction, cleanses society of its rot and provides a chance to start from scratch on a new set of terms.

But this fantasy is threatened by one of the key elements of the pandemic zombie narrative: globalization. In the eyes of survivors, interconnectedness is the reaper of all personal freedoms — and they do all they can to avoid it.

Walls are prominently featured in The Walking Dead as a way to keep out both zombies and other humans. In the film depiction of World War Z (2013), Jerusalem is besieged by hordes of zombies, which crawl up the walls like a slow-moving bacterial infection. Unlike the creatures of previous films, these migrant zombies move at fast speeds, with a sense of urgency, riffing on our fear of rapid migration rates .

In the early zombie films, small groups of survivors banded together to increase their chances of survival. In the post-apocalyptic genre, global unity is not possible; there are simply too many differing belief systems at play.

Instead, our world is fragmented into tribes — all insistent on surviving, but on their own terms. More than zombies, the true carriers of death and destruction are the remaining human factions, battling over limited resources.

And so the globalization of the zombie exposes our truest, deepest fear: each other.

A closing note

In 80 years, Americans managed to take the catatonic zombie of Haitian voodoo tradition and transmute it into a bloodied, vicious creature, intent on devouring everything in its wake.

Fear, which once compelled us to appropriate the zombie, has also governed the new symbology we’ve given it over the years. This makes the zombie not only a fascinating study of our country’s historical fears but also a window into how foreign ideas adopt new meaning when stripped of their original context over time.

But one thing has not changed: The zombie scares us by purging our darkest deeds — and in doing so, it makes us question what it means to be human.

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The philosopher’s zombie

The infamous thought experiment, flawed as it is, does demonstrate one thing: physics alone can’t explain consciousness.

by Dan Falk   + BIO

In his book Until the End of Time (2020), the physicist Brian Greene sums up the standard physicalist view of reality: ‘Particles and fields. Physical laws and initial conditions. To the depth of reality we have so far plumbed, there is no evidence for anything else.’ This physicalist approach has a heck of a track record. For some 400 years – roughly from the time of Galileo – scientists have had great success in figuring out how the Universe works by breaking up big, messy problems into smaller ones that could be tackled quantitatively through physics, with the help of mathematics. But there’s always been one pesky outlier: the mind . The problem of consciousness resists the traditional approach of science.

To be clear, science has made great strides in studying the brain, and no one doubts that brains enable consciousness. Scientists such as Francis Crick (who died in 2004) and Christof Koch made great strides in pinpointing the neural correlates of consciousness – roughly, the task of figuring out what sorts of brain activity are associated with what sorts of conscious experience. What this work leaves unanswered, however, is why conscious experience occurs at all.

There is no universally agreed-upon definition of consciousness. Awareness, including self-awareness, comes close; experience perhaps comes slightly closer. When we look at a red apple, certain neural circuits in our brains fire – but something more than that also seems to happen: we experience the redness of the apple. As philosophers often put the question: why is it like something to be a being-with-a-brain? Why is it like something to see a red apple, to hear music, to touch the bark of a tree, and so on? This is what David Chalmers called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness – the puzzle of how non-conscious matter, responding only to the laws of physics, gives rise to conscious experience (in contrast to the ‘easy problems’ of figuring out which sorts of brain activity are associated with which specific mental states). The existence of minds is the most serious affront to physicalism.

This is where the zombie – that is, the thought experiment known as the ‘philosopher’s zombie’ – comes in. The experiment features an imagined creature exactly like you or me, but with a crucial ingredient – consciousness – missing. Though versions of the argument go back many decades, its current version was stated most explicitly by Chalmers. In his book The Conscious Mind (1996), he invites the reader to consider his zombie twin, a creature who is ‘molecule for molecule identical to me’ but who ‘lacks conscious experience entirely’. Chalmers imagines the case where he’s ‘gazing out the window, experiencing some nice green sensations from seeing the trees outside, having pleasant taste experiences through munching on a chocolate bar, and feeling a dull aching sensation in my right shoulder.’ Then he imagines his zombie twin in the exact same environment. The zombie will look and even act the same as the real David Chalmers; indeed:

he will be awake, able to report the contents of his internal states, able to focus attention in various places, and so on. It is just that none of this functioning will be accompanied by any real conscious experience. There will be no phenomenal feel. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.

Imagining the zombie is step one in the thought experiment. In step two, Chalmers argues that if you can conceive of the zombie, then zombies are possible. And finally, step three: if zombies are possible, then physics, by itself, isn’t up to the job of explaining minds. This last step is worth examining more closely. Physicalists argue that bits of matter, moving about in accordance with the laws of physics, explain everything , including the workings of the brain and, with it, the mind. Proponents of the zombie argument counter that this isn’t enough: they argue that we can have all of those bits of matter in motion, and yet not have consciousness. In short, we could have a creature that looks like one of us, with a brain that’s doing exactly what our brains are doing – and still this creature would lack conscious experience. And therefore physics, by itself, isn’t enough to account for minds. And so physicalism must be false.

The zombie argument has recently been taken up by Philp Goff , who explores it in his book Galileo’s Error (2019). Once again, the issue isn’t whether zombies are actually walking among us, but rather, whether they could exist. Goff writes:

Nobody thinks that philosophical zombies exist, any more than they think flying pigs exist. But there is no contradiction in the idea of a zombie, and hence if our universe had been very different, perhaps if the laws of nature had been different, there could have been zombies roaming our planet.

In other words, it’s not just a question of what one can imagine ; people can imagine all sorts of implausible things. As Goff put it to me during a recent Zoom call: ‘The question is, are they logically coherent, and ultimately, are they possible in this very broad sense of possibility.’

At first, this seems like a powerful argument. If you believe that zombies could exist, you’re forced to accept the possibility that matter-in-motion can’t explain everything. In particular, the thing we hold most dear – our actual experience of the world – is missing. And so physicalism falters.

Even those who aren’t swayed by the zombie argument acknowledge its intellectual allure. ‘It’s elegant because it’s a very simple argument,’ says Keith Frankish , a philosopher with appointments at the University of Sheffield and the University of Crete. ‘It seems like you can get to a really big conclusion – a big radical conclusion – from a couple of fairly straightforward and attractive premises. That’s the dream of philosophers – to have these revolutionary arguments on the basis of premises that you can ascertain just in your armchair, just by thinking about it … If that isn’t seductive, I don’t know what is.’

A s one begins to dissect the zombie argument, however, problems arise. To begin with, are zombies in fact logically possible? If the zombie is our exact physical duplicate, one might argue, then it will be conscious by necessity . To turn it around: it may be impossible for a being to have all the physical properties that a regular person has, and yet lack consciousness. Frankish draws a comparison with a television set. He asks if we can imagine a machine with all the electronic processes that occur in a (working) television set taking place, and yet with no picture appearing on the screen. Many of us would say no: if all of those things happen, the screen lights up as a matter of course ; no extra ingredient is required.

Turning back to consciousness, Frankish adds: ‘I think if you really could understand everything the brain is doing – its 80 billion neurons, interconnected in goodness knows how many billions of ways, supporting an unimaginably wide range of sensitivities and reactions, including sensitivities to its own activity … If you could really imagine that in detail, then you wouldn’t feel that something was left out.’ (At the very least, this objection highlights how careful we have to be when we say that we ‘conceive’ of something. Can any of us really conceive of 80 billion of anything ?)

Clearly, a great deal rests on the issue of ‘conceivability’. Sean Carroll , a physicist at the California Institute of Technology who weighed in on the zombie issue in a recent paper , gives an example from mathematics: ‘If you went back 10,000 years and explained to someone what a prime number is, and asked: “Is it conceivable to you that there’s a largest prime number?” Well, they might say “yes”; as far as they can conceive, there could be a largest prime number. And then you can explain to them, no, there’s a very simple mathematical proof that there can’t be a largest prime number. And they go: “Oh, I was wrong – it’s not conceivable.”’

It’s asking us to picture a bird that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and yet is not a duck

In a similar vein, geometers long imagined that it might be possible to ‘square the circle’, a task that was eventually shown (in 1882) to be impossible. The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci , reflecting on how once-conceivable things often get demoted to the realm of the inconceivable, has written that ‘conceivability establishes nothing’. At the end of the day, Carroll finds the idea of conceivability too fuzzy to do what philosophers want it to do. ‘I think that conceivability is just a misplaced concept to use in arguments like this,’ he says, ‘because it is leveraging fuzziness to reach sweeping conclusions far beyond what is warranted by one’s state of knowledge.’

A closely related issue is the problem of accepting the zombie thought experiment’s premises at face value. We’re told that the zombie is just like us, and yet lacks consciousness. Let’s put this into practice: we meet a creature that looks and behaves just like a human, but a philosopher assures us that it’s actually a zombie. What would we make of their claim? Rebecca Hanrahan, a philosopher at Whitman College in Washington State, argues that in such a situation we would not, in fact, accept the claim that the creature lacked consciousness. ‘If I go to another world and see a creature that looks like me and acts like me, then I’m going to have to conclude that it also has the same phenomenological sensations that I do,’ she says. In other words, the first premise of the zombie thought experiment never gets off the ground: Chalmers asks us to accept a human duplicate who lacks consciousness as though this is a straightforward request – but it is not. To put it somewhat crudely, it’s asking us to picture a bird that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and yet is not a duck.

The zombie argument seems to belong to a class of arguments that Daniel Dennett calls ‘ intuition pumps ’. These are arguments – typically thought experiments – that lead the reader toward a certain appealing but not necessarily warranted conclusion. (Problems involving the mind and the brain seem to spawn more than their fair share of these problematic thought experiments; a well-known example is John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ argument against the possibility of explaining the mind in terms of information-processing; Dennett has shown convincingly where the argument falters.) In the case of the zombie argument, it’s suggested that we can easily picture a creature that has all the outward attributes of a normal, thinking human being, yet is one that lacks consciousness. But it turns out that conceiving of such a creature is no mean feat.

A nother problem centres on what consciousness actually does . As a philosopher would put it, what causal role does it play? Does it cause matter to move about? Or to put it another way: does consciousness impact behaviour? By Chalmers’s account, the zombie is supposed to behave exactly like us – even though we have conscious experiences and the zombie doesn’t. The implication seems to be that conscious experiences play no causal role in the world. But in that case, why even postulate its existence? The usual response is that consciousness is something we immediately experience; we can’t be wrong when we claim to be conscious. But when we reach for a glass of water, aren’t we doing so because of the conscious experience of being thirsty? If we are, then consciousness does, in fact, seem to impact behaviour; and if we aren’t, then consciousness seems to be nothing more than what philosophers call an epiphenomenon , a kind of secondary phenomenon. As Hanrahan puts it, consciousness would be like the humming sound that your computer makes – it’s always there when the computer is on, but it has no bearing on what the machine is actually computing.

Carroll’s objections to the zombie argument focus on precisely this point. ‘The zombie concept is only coherent if you think that none of our conscious experiences have any influence whatsoever on our behaviour,’ he says. Goff disputes this point; in Galileo’s Error , he argues that there is ‘ no contradiction in the idea that something with the same physical nature [as a human being] could lack an inner subjective life ’ [Goff’s italics] and that ‘there is no inconsistency or incoherence in the idea of a zombie.’

Zombies are either inveterate liars or, at a minimum, they’re extremely confused about their condition

The difficulty comes to a head when we look at the things we say about our conscious experiences. If I’m sad, I’ll say that I’m sad – but the zombie, in the same situation, would also say it’s sad (if it didn’t, we’d spot it due to this difference in behaviour). For Carroll, this stretches the argument to its breaking point. ‘If someone says “I’m sad”, and you say “Describe to me your sadness” – well, if you believe in the possibility of zombies, and the conceivability of zombies, then that experience of sadness can’t actually be influencing or informing what you say about your sadness,’ says Carroll. ‘And whatever you think about consciousness, that’s not consciousness as I understand it. When I’m sad or when I’m seeing red or when I’m feeling hot, that influences how I talk and move and behave in the world.’

Again, Goff sees the situation differently. After a prolonged back-and-forth with Carroll on a recent episode of the Mind Chat podcast, hosted by Goff and Frankish, Goff Tweeted: ‘The same software can be run on different hardware, it obviously doesn’t follow that the hardware doesn’t do anything … Likewise, the thesis that human behavioural functions could be realised in non-conscious zombie stuff doesn’t entail that human consciousness doesn’t do anything.’ Carroll replied in a blog post, arguing that, sure, the same computer program can be run on different machines (this is what philosophers refer to as ‘substrate independence’) – but he notes that the substrate doesn’t affect the outcome of the calculations. Analogously, he writes, those who want ‘to differentiate between the software of reality running on physical vs mental hardware cannot claim that consciousness gets any credit at all for our behaviour in the world.’

H owever one frames the relationship between minds, brains and bodies, there seems to be no getting around the problematic nature of the descriptions zombies give of themselves: they’re either inveterate liars – they insist they’re enjoying the taste of a delicious apple even though, by the terms of the thought experiment, they’re experiencing nothing at all – or, at a minimum, they’re extremely confused about their condition. And if the zombie is confused about what it is or is not experiencing, perhaps we are too. In fact, with just a little effort, one can enlist the zombies in support of physicalism: however sincerely we might say ‘But I know I’m conscious; I feel it; I cannot be wrong about this,’ we must bear in mind that the zombie would utter the exact same words in the same situation.

Does this mean that consciousness is merely an illusion? Frankish believes it is; he describes conscious experience as ‘a fiction written by our brains in order to help us track the impact that the world makes on us’. Carroll, in his book The Big Picture (2016), takes a slightly different tack; he writes that consciousness is real ‘in exactly the same way as fluids and chairs and universities and legal codes are real – in the sense that they play an essential role in a successful description of a certain part of the natural world, within a certain domain of applicability’. Goff, in contrast, defends a view known as panpsychism – roughly, the idea that everything in the world has mental qualities, or, as he put it (along with two co-authors) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world’.

Physicalists who aren’t swayed by the zombie argument are left pondering the question we began with: how, in a purely physical world, do minds arise? In Until the End of Time , Greene – as ardent a physicalist as they come – writes that the existence of minds represents ‘a critical gap in the scientific narrative … We lack a conclusive account of how consciousness manifests a private world of sights and sounds and sensations.’

Centuries from now (decades if we’re lucky), people will no longer speak of the hard problem as a great mystery

A step in the right direction, at least for thinkers such as Frankish, is to view consciousness not as a thing but as a process. Consciousness is something ‘that a very complex kind of organism does’, he says. He cites Dennett, who has pointed out that the cells in your brain are not fundamentally different from the cells in a big blob of yeast. ‘There’s no real difference between them,’ says Frankish; brains don’t contain some extra, special ingredient. ‘It’s just that the cells of a human brain are connected up in a very, very special way, compared to the cells in the bowl of yeast. And it’s what those cells are doing that makes the brain conscious.’

Carroll holds a broadly similar view. As he put it recently in an episode of his Mindscape podcast: ‘I think the world is made of stuff, obeying the laws of physics, and that’s basically it. Except when that stuff comes together to form complicated things, like human beings, there can be new, emergent phenomena that arise, and consciousness is one of those.’ Like Dennett and many others in the physicalist camp, Carroll believes the hard problem will eventually fade away – that is, centuries from now (decades if we’re lucky), people will no longer speak of it as a great mystery. Eventually, we’ll have learned enough about the workings of brains and their billions of neurons, says Carroll, that we’ll just say ‘Well, this is what happens when people have conscious experiences’ – adding: ‘And then the whole problem will just kind of go away.’

While the zombie argument, and the philosophical problems raised by it, may seem like mere pie-in-the-sky exercises that keep philosophers (and a few scientists) up at night, they tie into questions that have real-world consequences. Thinking about zombies forces us to think about how we deal with beings whose status as conscious entities is unclear – such as animals , for example, and foetuses , or some future versions of robots or artificial intelligences.

We all seem to agree that human beings are conscious, but how widespread is consciousness in the animal kingdom? ‘Is my dog conscious? Absolutely,’ says William Seager, a philosopher at the University of Toronto. ‘What about my parakeet? I think so. A rat? Probably. What about a snake, or a spider? Spiders act – they seem to want things. They form plans, they hunt, they seem to like to eat things, and they avoid situations that are dangerous. Are they conscious?’

The question is even thornier when we get to octopuses , which have a far more distributed neural structure than mammals. Since we don’t know exactly what generates consciousness, we struggle to determine who or what has it. Insects, for example, ‘are way simpler than us’, says Seager. ‘But that’s not fair; just because they’re simpler doesn’t mean they’re unconscious. So we have a kind of real-world zombie issue when we think about where consciousness cuts out, or where it turns on.’ Parallel questions inevitably come up when considering human development. At conception, a human embryo ‘is definitely not conscious, and at birth it’s definitely conscious’, says Seager. ‘Somewhere in the middle, consciousness turns on. We don’t really understand how that works. Again, we don’t know what it is about the brain that generates consciousness. So we have these conundrums.’

The zombie argument provokes for the same reason that the larger puzzle of consciousness provokes: it forces us to confront problems that stymied everyone from the ancient Greeks to Descartes and Galileo. Even the most hardened of the hardcore physicalists admit that the puzzle of consciousness is, well, puzzling. The zombie argument, flawed as it is, deserves credit for helping to bring difficult questions into sharp relief, even if it’s not the knock-down argument against physicalism that its proponents imagine it to be.

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I have been fascinated by the dual (and dueling) popularity of vampire and zombie franchises. So it was with great interest I read this article in the NYT. Some excerpts:

Zombies are a value stock. They are wordless and oozing and brain dead, but they’re an ever-expanding market with no glass ceiling. Zombies are a target-rich environment, literally and figuratively. The more you fill them with bullets, the more interesting they become. Roughly 5.3 million people watched the first episode of “The Walking Dead” on AMC, a stunning 83 percent more than the 2.9 million who watched the Season 4 premiere of “Mad Men.” This means there are at least 2.4 million cable-ready Americans who might prefer watching Christina Hendricks if she were an animated corpse. Statistically and aesthetically that dissonance seems perverse. But it probably shouldn’t. Mainstream interest in zombies has steadily risen over the past 40 years. Zombies are a commodity that has advanced slowly and without major evolution, much like the staggering creatures George Romero popularized in the 1968 film “Night of the Living Dead.” What makes that measured amplification curious is the inherent limitations of the zombie itself: You can’t add much depth to a creature who can’t talk, doesn’t think and whose only motive is the consumption of flesh. You can’t humanize a zombie, unless you make it less zombie-esque. There are slow zombies, and there are fast zombies — that’s pretty much the spectrum of zombie diversity. It’s not that zombies are changing to fit the world’s condition; it’s that the condition of the world seems more like a zombie offensive. Something about zombies is becoming more intriguing to us. And I think I know what that something is. Zombies are just so easy to kill. When we think critically about monsters, we tend to classify them as personifications of what we fear. Frankenstein’s monster illustrated our trepidation about untethered science; Godzilla was spawned from the fear of the atomic age; werewolves feed into an instinctual panic over predation and man’s detachment from nature. Vampires and zombies share an imbedded anxiety about disease. It’s easy to project a symbolic relationship between zombies and rabies (or zombies and the pitfalls of consumerism), just as it’s easy to project a symbolic relationship between vampirism and AIDS (or vampirism and the loss of purity). From a creative standpoint these fear projections are narrative linchpins; they turn creatures into ideas, and that’s the point. But what if the audience infers an entirely different metaphor? What if contemporary people are less interested in seeing depictions of their unconscious fears and more attracted to allegories of how their day-to-day existence feels? That would explain why so many people watched that first episode of “The Walking Dead”: They knew they would be able to relate to it. A lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies. If there’s one thing we all understand about zombie killing, it’s that the act is uncomplicated: you blast one in the brain from point-blank range (preferably with a shotgun). That’s Step 1. Step 2 is doing the same thing to the next zombie that takes its place. Step 3 is identical to Step 2, and Step 4 isn’t any different from Step 3. Repeat this process until (a) you perish, or (b) you run out of zombies. That’s really the only viable strategy. Every zombie war is a war of attrition. It’s always a numbers game. And it’s more repetitive than complex. In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gossip out of obligation, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche. The principal downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principal downside to life is that you will be never be finished with whatever it is you do. The Internet reminds of us this every day. Here’s a passage from a youngish writer named Alice Gregory, taken from a recent essay on Gary Shteyngart’s dystopic novel “Super Sad True Love Story” in the literary journal n+1: “It’s hard not to think ‘death drive’ every time I go on the Internet,” she writes. “Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me.” Ms. Gregory’s self-directed fear is thematically similar to how the zombie brain is described by Max Brooks, author of the fictional oral history “World War Z” and its accompanying self-help manual, “The Zombie Survival Guide”: “Imagine a computer programmed to execute one function. This function cannot be paused, modified or erased. No new data can be stored. No new commands can be installed. This computer will perform that one function, over and over, until its power source eventually shuts down.” This is our collective fear projection: that we will be consumed. Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have. All of it comes at us endlessly (and thoughtlessly), and — if we surrender — we will be overtaken and absorbed. Yet this war is manageable, if not necessarily winnable. As long we keep deleting whatever’s directly in front of us, we survive. We live to eliminate the zombies of tomorrow. We are able to remain human, at least for the time being. Our enemy is relentless and colossal, but also uncreative and stupid. Battling zombies is like battling anything … or everything.

For some time, I have been operating with a basic assumption: Because of psychological and romantic dynamics, women are more likely to be attracted to vampire stories; because of violent and brutish dynamics, men are more likely to be attracted to zombie stories. Apart from how utterly sexist that sounds, working with pretty gross gender typing, the many conversations I’ve had on the subject of vampires and zombies with my college students confirms this basic divide between the sexes. But this war of attrition dynamic laid out in the NYT article and the concomitant idea that zombies represent our fear of being ‘consumed’ by the requirements of modern life resonates with me. Zombies are relentless. Their threat never stops. Just like the details of our lives — work, email, parenting, spouse, pets, bills, schedules. No matter how many zombies we kill / items we cross off our To do list, they just keep coming. How about you? What’s your theory about vampire vs. zombie stories? What is the source of their respective appeals? Which do you prefer — and why? Comment Archive

Written by Scott Myers

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The Zombie Apocalypse Exercise: A College Essay Exercise

Updated: Jul 11, 2023

There are few things that cause panic in a student like mentioning the words, "college essay." It's understandable; our educational culture has shed an unflattering light on the word "essay." After all, in popular culture, what are "bad" students forced to do? Write. They are forced to write on the chalkboard, write an apology note, or write a reflection essay. When students are asked to write in class, they are usually forced to conform their vision to a set of rules or standards such as word counts, page minimums, page maximums, specific citation styles, or an inflexible essay structure that acts like more of a recipe than an expression of a student's thoughts and ideas.

College essays are different from any essay most students will ever write in their English class, and that's why I love them. I've spoken at length about how the college search is so much more than just an acceptance letter. The college search offers an incredibly valuable opportunity for students to turn their gaze inward and begin an important journey of self-reflection and growth. If a student approaches the college search with an open mind, they will find themselves analyzing who they are, how they became themselves, and what they hope to be in the future. That introspection provides the resources for crafting compelling and unique essays that show both authenticity and vulnerability.

Some college essays have very specific prompts that can be skillfully dissected and deciphered to discover what sort of response the college is searching for. Students tend to have an easier time with prompts, but in my experience, real growth comes from the moments where a student must choose their own topic. It saddens me to say it, but many students go through their entire K-12 education without ever writing an essay on a topic of their choosing with no restrictions on style or formatting. Because most students learn writing while confined within a cage of rules, very few know where they should even begin to compose something that is uniquely theirs. I've seen this scenario countless times with students, so today I'm going to breakdown a simple, but effective, exercise to help brainstorm ideas, topics, and themes for a college essay.

Table of Contents:

Why a Zombie Apocalypse?

What is the zombie apocalypse exercise.

How to use the Zombie Apocalypse Exercise

The Zombie Apocalypse Exercise in Practice

The zombie apocalypse exercise.

Here's a nifty infographic with a brief synopsis of the exercise, but below we will delve further.

While there are likely other survival (and non-survival) team-building exercises that could be used to explore personal values and skill sets, the case for the zombie apocalypse remains the strongest. The Walking Dead TV show, Resident Evil video games, and George A. Romero's movies are among many other media giants keeping zombies (un)alive in the sphere of popular culture. When college admission officers are reviewing applications, they are always looking for reasons to admit an applicant, and it's important to remember that they are taking the time to visualize each student as a member of that college's student body. So what does each applicant who is admitted bring to the table? In more cases than not, they are looking for applicants who offer something special or unique, be it a quality or characteristic, a skillset, or a particular value.

Similarly, when we think about a zombie apocalypse, particularly how they are portrayed in film, there is always some component of building a survival team (consider Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, and 28 Days Later). But how does one determine which team to join, or how does a team determine who might be a welcome addition? In order to answer this question, we need to break down what characteristics and skill sets might be needed to help a group thrive (and survive), and this might vary by location, the skills already existing within the group, group size and culture, or any number of other things. Just like colleges, who focus on institutional priorities when building their incoming class, the needs of the group likely supersede the needs of a single potential group member.

While we might be talking about a zombie apocalypse, any number of other examples can be used in its place. Another example to conceptualize this idea is joining or recruiting for a football team. If a team already has three quarterbacks (which, according to the internet, is pretty rare), they most likely aren't seeking a fourth. Or perhaps you are interested in joining a trivia team because you have extensive knowledge of pop culture and music, and you meet a group of people whose knowledge base revolves around history, classical music, the Marvel universe, and award winning movies--you likely would be a unique asset to the team.

All this to say, in a zombie apocalypse, I imagine being on a well-balanced team of complementary individuals will likely yield more positive results.

The Zombie Apocalypse exercise is a unique and fun way to conceptualize your place in the world, on a team (or in this case, an incoming college class), and how your attributes can aid in the capacity of a team to survive and thrive. Ultimately, with the right guidance, many students will find the vocabulary to not only advocate for their place on a zombie survival team, but also how to advocate for themselves in joining an academic or professional community.

Consider the case of COVID-19, which resulted in an unprecedented impact on students and education systems across the globe. The colleges that remained open to students and operated successfully with in-person learning between 2020 and 2021 all had a handful of things in common: the resources to remain open in a safe capacity (which required frequent testing, isolation space for those who may have been infected, and the ability to socially distance), a campus community that understood the severity of the pandemic (following strict guidelines), and a student body composed of resilient and determined students. The skills and traits that students embraced to make the most of this turbulent time are the same traits I would be looking for in those interested in joining my survival team.

You need more than just brains (ha, zombie jokes) to survive and thrive during an apocalypse (and in any college, job, and relationship). So what do you bring to the table?

How to Use the Zombie Apocalypse Exercise

While most brainstorming exercises can be done efficiently by oneself, the zombie exercise is most effective when more than one person engages. Exploring this idea with others creates space to challenge each other to dig deep and explore the why instead of the what. For example, let's say you're fast and you feel that is your best attribute for a zombie apocalypse team. What if that team already has several fast members, so speed isn't an attribute they're looking for? If you still believe speed is the factor that should get you on the team, how do you plan to utilize it in a way that is mutually and uniquely beneficial? If you can't think of an answer to these follow-up questions, what's your next argument for being allowed membership?

Ideally, throughout these discussions with friends, family, advisors, and mentors, you are learning how to describe your unique skill sets beyond the typical hard skills (like strength, lock-picking, first-aid, speed, etc.). This exercise is designed to get you to think beyond what you typically would consider a skill, and to explore how you envision, identify, and communicate your strengths. In addition, the conversational piece of this exercise allows for at least one participant to play the devil's advocate role. For example, let's say you're having this conversation with a recruiter for a desirable job. When the recruiter tells you that being proficient in a specific coding language isn't enough to get you the job, how do you present this particular skill in a convincing manner? Or how do you process and redirect the conversation toward this open opportunity to explore other attributes that may be more relevant, enticing, and desirable?

In this exercise, it's also important to consider what type of team you would even want to join. Who's to say that my team is going to be the best team? For example, if you're a leader, and we already have a leader, we likely won't want too many cooks in the kitchen or the whole team could dissolve into a flurry of arguments and competition about ideas. In these cases, it's particularly helpful to consider what kind of team you would want to form if starting one from scratch. What kinds of skill can enhance your own? What traits, skills, and attributes would make you feel safe, confident, and supported? In the case of college admissions, we briefly discussed how the admission officer may view a student in the context of the incoming class they are trying to build. Considering the type of team you would like to join is very similar to considering what type of college might be a good fit for you. And by ensuring that you're applying to good-fit colleges, you'll also be cognizant about what you're looking for in a school, inasmuch as the school is looking for specific students.

The following is a step-by-step script of how this exercise might play out:

Find a friend, and establish who is the team seeker and who is the team recruiter.

The person seeking the team member (the recruiter) asks what the other person (the seeker) might bring to the team.

The seeker replies with a particular skill they see as valuable, unique, and necessary for survival.

The recruiter then refuses the suggestion of that particular skill set, while giving a reason for the refusal (for example, the team already has a fast runner, a leader, a locksmith, and a medic, so being CPR/first-aid certified doesn't help the team much).

The applicant responds by either honing in on the aforementioned skillset and making an argument for why their skills would still be beneficial despite the objection, or offering a value proposition different than their first, so that they can still vie for a spot on the survival team.

Rinse and repeat.

Good luck (but I know you won't need it),

Jessica Chermak, LPC, CEP

Independent College Counselor

Co-Founder of Virtual College Counselors

[email protected]

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Literature Review — A Literary Analysis of Zombie Love Play by Earl T. Roske

A Literary Analysis of Zombie Love Play by Earl T. Roske

• Categories: Literature Review Zombie

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Published: Sep 12, 2018

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Zombies in the Real Life Essay

Today, the public discuss zombies as part of the popular culture, although during the decades, these creatures were associated only with frightening religious practices typical for the African and Caribbean cultures and traditions. That is why, now zombies are the topic for the active discussion in different cultural, social, and religious fields. If the persons interested in horror films and video games discuss zombies as made-up creatures, the followers of the Voodoo religion state that zombies are the part of their reality as witches and different evil spirits. Thus, although the concept of ‘zombie’ is discussed by the adherents of the Voodoo religion as reflecting the real creatures, zombies are made up mythical creatures which represent the people’s religious visions, fears of the death and abuse, and the aspects of the people’s opinion on such a type of social relations as slavery.

Zombies are usually defined as the revived corpses which move and act because of the use of magical means. Following the traditional presentation of zombies in films and video games, it is possible to note that “zombies do not think or speak – they simply act, relying on purely physical manifestations of terror” (Bishop 197). As a result, modern filmmakers rely on the concept of ‘zombie’ to create an effective horror film to evoke the audience’s fears. Today, zombies, as made-up creatures, play a significant role in the popular culture, and the history of the word ‘zombie’ can demonstrate the development of the people’s attitude to the concept. The word ‘zombie’ comes from the Kimbundu term meaning ‘the ghost,’ and it appears in the Creole language with the spread of the slave trade. In this case, the word ‘zombie’ means the mindless labor force (Bishop 197). The modern connotations of the word ‘zombie’ are numerous because this concept is used to discuss the part of the Voodoo religion, the monsters depicted in the media, and the tired persons who act automatically. Thus, the word ‘zombie’ does not reflect the real creatures which eat humans, but this made-up concept describes the set of features typical for mindless and ill persons as well as for slaves.

From this point, the concept of ‘zombie’ has changed significantly because modern meanings of the word have few similarities with the traditional visions. The word ‘zombie’ became actively used in the 18th century to represent the slaves and the nature of the power relations in the Haitian culture (Murphy 53). Furthermore, the word described the spirits of dead persons who could act as slaves after the revival of their corpses as a result of the Voodoo priests’ actions. The myth of zombies based on the idea of the mindless slavery formed quickly, and more details were added to this vision. For instance, in the Haitian myth, a zombie was “a person bodily raised from the grave and turned into a slave worker” (McAlister 459).

As a slave worker, a zombie had few chances to become free. Thus, “the zombie breaks the master’s spell when it ingests salt and can die, once again, but this time free” (Murphy 53). In other situations, zombies as the revived corpses remain to be traumatized and mindless creatures punished for leaving their owners. If the myth of zombies contributed to the development of slavery and power relations in the Haitian culture two centuries ago, today this myth is revised and presented in the horror films in the form of the cannibalistic walking dead.

Modern zombies are only the symbolic representations of the people’s fears of dead persons, corpses, and spirits. Literature cannot be discussed as the source of information about zombies because of their nature, and the public develops its knowledge of zombies mainly referring to films and video games because the visual media develop the zombie idea more effectively. The zombie depicted in films is the mystical walking dead, the monster which eats people and can be controlled only with the help of magical means (Bishop 197). Thus, modern zombies as the symbolic structures developed from the Voodoo religious vision are not real, but they are the reflections of powerful myths manipulating the people’s fears. From this perspective, a zombie today is “a ghoul who lumbers around trying to eat people” (McAlister 460).

George Romero focused on depicting zombies in his films in the 1960s, and the era of ‘zombification’ started. More zombie films are produced each decade, and the popularity of this theme in films even influenced literature, and the parody novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies became the bestseller (McAlister 460). Today, ‘zombie’ is the popular concept actively used in different types of zombie-themed images and captions spread in the media, including social networks and newspapers. Thus, focusing on zombies, filmmakers, and journalists follow the trend, but these zombies are only symbolic images to represent the cannibalistic corpses.

However, many researchers support the idea that zombies are real because, in the Haitian culture and Voodoo religion, priests can use different substances to make people become zombies. Thus, according to these views, zombification can be discussed as the result of pharmacology and the Voodoo priests’ use of powerful neurotoxins (Bishop 197). Nevertheless, the experiments and surveys cannot prove the presented hypotheses, and the secret of the Haitian zombies remains to be unsolved. People are inclined to focus more on the promotion of the traditional vision of zombies used in the horror films, and these zombies are only symbolic monsters and mystical images which differ significantly from the original vision of zombies as slaves. From this point, the concept of ‘zombie’ traditionally reflects the unequal nature of the slavery institution with references to the mystical explanations. As a result, zombies are only part of the cultural and religious myth.

Although the idea of zombies is actively manipulated in the Haitian culture, zombies are real only in people’s fantasies and myths. That is why, the made-up zombies depicted in films and video games are not associated with the Haitian culture, and only the followers of the Voodoo religion are fearful of being punished for becoming a zombie. Nevertheless, researchers cannot provide reliable evidence to prove the fact that people can be turned in zombies. That is why zombies can be discussed only as of the products of the human minds and imagination, which became popular because of their intriguing nature. From this point, the notion of ‘zombie’ is usually not discussed as reflecting the real creature because of the idea’s complex mystical and symbolic nature. Thus, modern zombies are only monsters depicted in visual media.

Works Cited

Bishop, Kyle. “Raising the Dead”. Journal of Popular Film and Television 33.4 (2006): 196-205. Print.

McAlister, Elizabeth. “Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies”. Anthropological Quarterly 85.2 (2012): 457–486. Print.

Murphy, Kieran. “White Zombie”. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 15.1 (2011): 47-55. Print.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, May 12). Zombies in the Real Life. https://ivypanda.com/essays/zombies-in-the-real-life/

"Zombies in the Real Life." IvyPanda , 12 May 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/zombies-in-the-real-life/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Zombies in the Real Life'. 12 May.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Zombies in the Real Life." May 12, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/zombies-in-the-real-life/.

1. IvyPanda . "Zombies in the Real Life." May 12, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/zombies-in-the-real-life/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Zombies in the Real Life." May 12, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/zombies-in-the-real-life/.

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• The Most Realistic Character in "The Iliad" by Homer
• The Archetype of Sacrifice in Literature

Zombie colleges roam the internet, here's how to spot a legitimate, living university

A USA TODAY investigation has exposed websites set up for closed universities posing as viable colleges.

Whoever is behind the copycat sites has been collecting application fees and personal student identity information. Once USA TODAY reached out to them for comment, some of the sites and their application links came down.

The investigation also found a network of fictitious colleges claiming to be accredited, generally the gold standard of legitimate universities in the U.S., however, those accreditors appear to be fabricated as well.  (Do you know more about these colleges, tell us. )

Investigation: Zombie colleges? These universities are living another life online, and no one can say why

So how can prospective students know which schools actually offer an education and which may be fronts for something else?  Luckily, there are telltale signs.  But it may take some sleuthing. 

Is it accredited?  

If a university wants to offer federal student aid, it has to be:

◾ Approved by a college accreditor.

◾ Approved by the state it resides in.

◾ Certified by the U.S. Department of Education, based, in part, on the first two.

Oversight of a school’s academic offerings falls to the accreditor, who is expected to review curriculums regularly. These accrediting agencies also visit schools in person.  

Prospective students can see if a school is truly accredited by looking it up on the federal government’s consumer guide to schools, the College Scorecard . Universities also often list their accreditors on their websites, which students can check against the accreditors’ own lists. Many states maintain a list of schools they have authorized as well. 

Check the web address 

It can be as simple as just checking the end of the university’s web address. 

Generally, only accredited colleges can use a .edu domain in their URL. Domains ending in .college, .education, or .university aren’t restricted to educational institutions, though. The website backed by former staffers at Marymount California University is marymountcalifornia.edu whereas the imposter website is at marymountcalifornia.education.  

Or pick up your phone and try to reach someone in college admissions. Legitimate colleges have entire staffs eager to talk to prospective students. It’s their job.

Some of the questions to ask: 

◾ When is the next application deadline?

◾ What do you need for the application? An essay? Test scores? Do you accept the Common Application , a form used by hundreds of colleges?

◾ How much does your program cost? Do you offer federal financial aid?

How do I tell if a college accreditor is real?  

Some of the imposter websites appeared to have created their own accreditors. Skeptical applicants can verify an accreditor's legitimacy by checking the Education Department’s list of approved agencies .

Note: Some accreditors are set up to approve only specific academic programs. Look instead for institutional accreditation, i.e., approval of all of the schools’ operations.  

Pay close attention to accreditors’ names too. Some counterfeit schools claimed accreditation by the “United States Higher Learning Commission.” That is close to the actual accrediting organization known as “The Higher Learning Commission.”   

Does the school have an address? Google it 

Some of the counterfeit universities claim strange addresses. The original Stratford University, for example, was in Virginia, but the imposter says the university is in Kentucky. In that case, a Google Street View search of the Kentucky address reveals no signage for a university.  

Many of the fictitious universities on the website of the Ministry of Higher Education Commission, one of the made-up accreditors, list unusual physical addresses too. The address for “Dakota Hill University,” for example, is actually home to Black Hills State University, a school that is accredited. USA TODAY found other schools with addresses that showed up on Google as nondescript office buildings, even parking garages. 

Be aware of the university’s size too. Some legitimate and smaller schools focused on career skills can be in office parks. But such a location would be unusual for large state or private colleges.  

Has anyone else attended this college? Who teaches there?  

Try to find past students. With LinkedIn, it’s easy to locate graduates of any college. Some schools also have alumni associations where prospective students may be able to learn more about the institution.  

Be wary of student testimonials that live solely on a college’s website because those could be fabricated by the operators of the university. Apply the same skepticism to sites that gather anonymous reviews such as Yelp – or even the reviews you might find on Google or Facebook.   

University professors should also have a web presence. Legitimate colleges often have individual web pages for their faculty members. Some college websites also feature past course catalogs. The new Stratford website, in contrast, listed only broad descriptions of its degree offerings and did not indicate who would be teaching those courses. That also was true of other zombie sites.  

Chris Quintana is a reporter on the USA TODAY investigations team with a background in higher education and student loans. Contact him at  [email protected] , @CquintanaDC on Instagram and X, or by Signal at 202-308-9021.   

The Sex Lives of Cicadas, Revealed

It may sound like a mosh pit out there. But to the participants, mating is a delicate, sonorous affair, fraught with potential missteps — and fungal zombies.

Credit... Rudy Gutierrez

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By Alan Burdick

• Published May 8, 2024 Updated May 10, 2024

The moment has arrived.

After years underground, periodical cicadas — insects of the genus Magicicada — are emerging by the trillions across more than a dozen states to molt, sing, court and mate. A casual human listener could mistake their collective chorus for the sound of a U.F.O. landing:

But to the individual cicada, what’s underway is a courtship ritual as intimate and intricate as a tango. The stakes are high; the potential missteps are many.

Review the guest list

This year, in a rare “dual emergence,” two groups of periodical cicadas are in attendance: Brood XIII, or the Northern Illinois Brood, comprising as many as three species of 17-year cicada in some locations, and Brood XIX, the Great Southern Brood, comprising up to four species of 13-year cicada. Their songs — like those of Magicicada septendecim and Magicicada neotredecim, below — can sound deceptively similar:

Arrive early(ish)

Female cicadas typically mate just once, so it behooves the male to emerge early — hence the mad rush from the soil to the treetops. But don’t be too early: The first cicadas over the top are ripe for slaughter, when “everything is hungry and predators discover that they’re the best thing to eat,” said David Marshall, a biologist and expert on periodical cicadas.

The odds of reproducing improve in the second wave, once what ecologists call “predator satiation” has set in. “You want to be Johnny on the spot,” Dr. Marshall said. “And if you show up late, you’re really screwing up.”

After emerging, you may need several days to adjust to life aboveground. Right away you’ll molt, squeezing out of your nymph exoskeleton and unfurling your wings; slowly you’ll solidify and turn a glossy black. Soon enough, when the air turns warm and the sun is bright, it will be time for the males to sing.

Rattle your tymbals

The male cicada is an amplified beer can. The abdomen is hollow, and on either side is a membrane called a tymbal, not unlike a woofer: Vibrate it, and the sound broadcasts. To change the frequency, alter the shape and position of the abdomen.

Sing a little, fly a little

Courtship proceeds in roughly three phases, each with an associated song specific to a particular species. Initially, the male sings a brief, inviting phrase a couple of times, flies a foot or two, lands and sings again. “He’s acoustically trolling for receptive females,” Dr. Marshall said. The song of M. tredecim, a trill that bends into what scientists call a downslur as the male arcs his abdomen downward, sounds like an inverted question mark: bzzz-ewwwww .

Stop, look, listen

Most females will be unreceptive to male advances; either they have already mated or are not yet physiologically ready. Males, be on the lookout for subtle wing flicks, the little shrugs of potential interest. Eventually these become loud, obvious snaps of her wings.

Meanwhile, beware the buttinsky that lands nearby. Competing males can produce an interference buzz, like this one by M. tredecim: a slurred version of the invitational phrase, which jams the first male’s call, makes the female ignore him and prompts him to fly off, discouraged.

Now get closer

If the female expresses interest — if she snaps her wings within about a half-second of the male’s invitation — the male should approach and switch to the next song. This resembles the first song but comes in a rapid series with no gaps between phrases.

Business time

Until this moment it’s been hands- and legs-off, but now the male may reach out and gingerly touch the female, perhaps near the eye, as he switches to his last song, a series of staccato notes. Let the actual mating commence (and give it three to five hours to conclude).

Through all of this, the female has one job, Dr. Marshall notes: “Don’t mate with the wrong species.” With a variety of beer cans clattering all around, maybe transmitting a song physically is a good, final way of reassuring the female that she has picked the right brand.

Oh, and avoid the zombies!

As cicadas first burrow up through the soil, some will encounter the spores of Massospora cicadina, a fungus that turns cicadas into sex-crazed, spore-filled zombies intent on mating and spreading the infection. Woe unto the deceived, Dr. Marshall said: “He’ll become a hapless spore-spreader for the next generation.”

A happy ending

In four to six weeks it will all be over, the dance floor littered with spent cicada carcasses, the air stinking of decay — and the trees bearing small nests of cicada eggs. In another six to 10 weeks the eggs will hatch and the tiny nymphs will drop to the ground, burrow down, find a rootlet to sip on, and wait. See you in 13 or 17 years!

Produced by Antonio de Luca , Hang Do Thi Duc , Rodrigo Honeywell and Matt McCann .

Audio via the University of Connecticut .

Alan Burdick is an editor on the Health and Science desk. More about Alan Burdick

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Nikki Haley’s Zombie Campaign Gets 20% In Indiana

May 8, 2024 at 7:00 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Politico : “A zombie Haley candidacy continued to punch above its weight in the Trumpiest of states: The former South Carolina governor is on track to break 20% for the first time since she dropped out of the race two months ago.”

Daily Beast : “Particularly concerning for Trump’s camp was his relatively poor performance in the counties outside Indianapolis—with Haley’s ballot line garnering upwards of 30 percent in several crucial suburban areas.”

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Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC .

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