The science of zombies (well, sort of)
It’s a classic story. You get on the Tube and pick up a copy of Metro. As usual, you start reading from the back page – you love your sports! You notice the Tube is strangely quiet for half eight on a Monday morning... in fact, it’s eerily quiet. Oh well, at least you can digest your Metro in peace.
As you read, you become aware of a unpleasant odour – a cloying, sweet smell with undertones of rotten dog food.
You glance toward the source of the olfactory assault expecting to see that tramp with the drippy nose. Instead, your eyes are greeted by the vacant (yet lustful) stare of an unusually animated corpse.
You try to run, but the creature’s ludicrously slow, shuffling gait is too much to overcome and, before you know it, you have stumbled on a discarded eye ball.
Before you have the chance to question the presence of a loose eyeball on the Underground, the zombie is upon you. His rotten hands claw at your clothing, pulling you closer into his decomposing embrace.
The last thing you are aware of is the fetid, mouldering stench of the creature’s breath and, before you can ponder the need for the undead to breathe, he tears into your flesh.
On a normal day, this would be the start of a long eternity of blissful oblivion. But you have been infected by a zombie and, by mechanisms expertly skirted over in this tale, your expired flesh is being reanimated.
You are no longer just dead, now you are undead. Barely aware of your surroundings, your primitive, impulse-driven brain can only formulate one word and it drives you towards your first victim – ‘Braaiiiins...’.
Don’t just hate it when a Monday starts badly.
This is the classic ‘horror movie’ view of the undead but can zombies really exist?
In 1980, Angelina Narcisse was walking through the market of L’Estère, a rural village in the Caribbean country of Haiti. Ahead of her, a familiar figure was approaching. It took Angelina a moment or two to recognise the man as her brother, Clairvius, but when she did, she let out a shriek of terror.
Under normal circumstances this might be an unorthodox way to greet your brother, but these circumstances were far from normal because Angelina had buried her brother 18 years earlier.
When questioned, Clairvius said he was alive but paralysed when the doctor declared him dead – he even remembered being buried. He claimed he had been exhumed by a bokor (voodoo priest), resurrected and turned into a zombie. Practitioners of voodoo (vodou to the Haitians) believe if a person dies an unnatural death, their soul, unable to join the ancestors, lingers at the grave.
In this vulnerable state, the soul can be captured by a bokor, locked in a bottle and used to control the victim’s expired corpse.
The undead can then be employed as the ultimate in slave labour – a tireless, unquestioning servant who will cater for your every whim. To the Haitians, a zombie is a pitiful creature and not a brain-devouring terror – they fear becoming a zombie but don’t fear the zombie itself.
Clairvius Narcisse’s claims prompted an investigation called the Zombie Project.
Between 1982 and 1984, Canadian ethobotanist and anthropologist Dr Wade Davis investigated zombie reports all over Haiti. He concluded that, instead of using sorcery to control the recently deceased, the bokors used a complex concoction of neurotoxins and other chemicals to simulate death in their victims.
After burial, the paralysed body would be exhumed, revived and placed into a drug-induced, coma-like state that turned the unfortunate soul into a sort of fleshy automaton that could be put to work on the plantations. Dr Davis believed this is what happened to Clairvius. He racked up an unaffordable debt to his brother, who hired a bokor to zombify Clairvius – who was then sold to work on a plantation.
In 1980, the plantation owner died and, after 18 years of servitude, Clairvius recovered from his drug-addled stupor and walked home.
Dr Davis’s conclusions are not without criticism. His methods, which involved observing grave desecrations, have been described as ‘unscientific’ and the ability of his neurotoxins to induce a zombie-like state has been widely questioned.
The existence of human zombies may be controversial but this is not so in nature. There are fungi and parasites that have found ways of inducing a zombie-like states in their unfortunate victims...
No comments:
Post a Comment