Some dirty hippies would like to coddle them while they strum folk songs on their guitars about flower power and peace. But an enemy like this does not appreciate peace, or flowers. They are relentless, bloodthirty monsters who simply cannot be reasoned with. I speak, of course, of the greatest enemy we have ever faced: the walking dead, zombies.

The zombi of vodou lore were once confined to the work of bokor. As Wade Davis discussed in Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie, a coup de poudre (French for “powder strike”) could wound a victim with a blade laced with tetrodotoxin (TTX), the same toxin found in Japanese pufferfish. When tetrodotoxin is introduced into the bloodstream at near-lethal doses (about 1mg), it will induce a death-like state that can last for several days—long enough for the victim to be taken for dead, and buried. The bokor then returns to complete the transformation with a second drug, a dissociative hallucinogen like datura, that will rob the victim of his will, and make him a zombi slave of the bokor.

Western cultures first learned of the looming zombie threat from Orson Wells’ adaptation of Macbeth, set on a Haitian plantation, in which zombies became representative of slavery. But the most terrifying development in zombie ecology must be the development of the zombie infection, first noticed by Richard Matheson, who raised the warning with his cautionary tale, I am Legend. Truly one of the greatest of our kind, a visionary and honored son of my own Pittsburgh, none less than George Romero, helped spread the word of the looming threat with his documentary, Night of the Living Dead, followed by Land of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead. But in the end, even such visionary bravery could not save George Romero from the very creeping horror he warned us about.

In both Dawn of the Dead and its sequel, a single phrase governs the film’s concern with identification and difference: “they’re us.” This phrase—which oscillates suggestively between oxymoron and tautology—functions as a kind of shorthand for the troubled relations between human beings and zombies. The paradox posed by the zombies’ human/inhuman condition is expressed in Roger’s terrified, half-human face when he “returns” from the dead. It is also present when, having secured and “cleaned up” the mall, the survivors stand staring down at the zombies outside as they vainly claw at the glass doors. In this brilliantly conceived scene, it is Peter who makes the chillingly simple observation “they’re us.” Fran gives a slight shiver and pulls up the collar of her expensive fur coat (an apparently unnecessary garment under the air-conditioned circumstances), indicating that while guns constitute an effective defense from the enemy, consumer goods provide the psychological protection against any pricks of conscience. The scene dramatizes, perhaps better than any other scene in contemporary cinema, the senses in which consumers become guiltily aware not only of their own pleasures, but of the social costs of consumerism. Clearly, Romero’s take on consumer society constitutes a humanist, radical, and one might say Adornian critique of racism, sexism and exploitation. As Tania Modleski writes, in many horror movies “the attack on contemporary life strikingly recapitulates the very terms adopted by many culture critics” and Romero himself has even been described as a “radical critic of American culture.”¹

Originally standing in for slaves, in Romero’s vision, zombies bore more in common with consumers. Of course, are they really so far apart?

The Haitian Zombie is a reflection of the American corporations needs for cheap labour, in deconstructing the myth; one can see that the Haitians fear of Le Zombi, is the fear of returning to slavery, for the Zombie is the ultimate slave. Neither living nor dead, neither free nor bonded, but under the total control and ownership of a master, the Zombie is the ultimate wage-slave, the perfect worker under capitalism.

It is both a metaphor for and a social construction of reality, reflecting the change in Haitian society from agricultural labour and small land holders, to the large scale export based industrial agricultural of American corporations. American colonial capitalisms need for wage-slaves produces Le Zombi as a modernist icon of alienation. …

That fear is the fear of loss of control, which was actually experienced by the entire working population under capitalism, as the value of the individual was reduced to their ability to sell their labour, they went from job to job unsure of their future, or if they were factory workers they were slaves to the machine in the nightmare of their own self creation, their daily lives felt like a dream or nightmare, from which there was no escape.²

Heroes like the Zombie Preparedness Initiative or Zombie Squad have been doing their best to mobilize and prepare us for the creeping zombie horror. Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide will remind you of simple truths, like the fact that you never have to reload a blade. Sure, they’re helping spread information valuable for any kind of social breakdown, from natural disasters to even something as outlandish as an economic breakdown from diminishing marginal returns on social complexity, but the most pressing and immediate concern is the zombie threat.

When they got our superheroes, it was all over. Now, we see them everywhere. Behind the counter at retail stores, that unliving gleam in their dead eyes, barely mustering the capacity for human speech—or on the other side of the counter, ravenously consuming their precious goods, mindless throngs stumbling with that glazed look into the stores. Is it any wonder that at the conclusion of the 2004 “Z-Day” incident, the “mobile deceased” were so easily employed in the service sector?

Being pickier than koala bears has been the only advantage we’ve enjoyed over these living dead. Since they only eat human brains, we’ve been caught in a vicious cycle with these monsters. As the zombie hordes grow, the number of survivors grows tiny, leaving the zombies with no brains to consume. They languish, while the human population starts to rise again—but that replenishes the stock of healthy brains, and the whole, terrible cycle begins again.³

It’s difficult to escape them. They fill our cities, even while the human survivors flock to those same cities for protection. In Land of the Dead, native son George Romero outlined plans how Pittsburgh’s three rivers, when combined with an impenetrable fence, could turn downtown into a last bastion against the undead horde. Of course, being a native Pittsburgher, he should have realized the zombifying effect of the eldritch, ever-shifting, infernal landscape of downtown Pittsburgh itself—a geography not very different from that of Tolkien’s Mordor. Even as respected a news source as The Onion covered Pittsburgh’s vulnerability to zombie attack.

But, from the evidence deep inside my underground bunker buried beneath Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill, I can tell you that such preparations are too late. They are already here, all around us, and there was no massive battle, no terrifying outbreak. It came slowly, insiduously, silently … and now, they’re everywhere. Almost everyone here has caught the infection. They live only to consume … they are already dead, but they keep walking around, driven by their need for more and more. Brains, of course. What else would I mean?

The Zombie Apocalypse: It’s not just coming—it’s already here.