Zombies are real and live amongst us! Before you laugh yourself out of your chair, or start thinking that I read Max Brook's The Zombie Survival Guide and didn't know that it was parody, give me a chance to explain what I mean.

There are kinds of zombies and each is real to a particular extent.

HOLLYWOOD ZOMBIES
Hollywood began with making a few movies about West Indian zombies and Haitian voodoo, but they proved pretty silly Bela Lugosi schlock affronts to reason. They then proceeded to make some movies about hypnotic and mesmer zombies with mad scientists using mind control. Again, not very scary and certainly not profitable. But then Hollywood hit on the secret. They made movies with zombies that were monsters, not victims: flesh-eating and rotting reanimated corpses that would unremittingly seek to devour the living. Hollywood found a trope that they could use, that the public would love, and that made a profit. What Hollywood never understood completely is that the success of the Hollywood Zombie is based in its metaphoric value. And that's what is real about Hollywood zombies.

The Hollywood zombie is a metaphor, and that makes it alive. In Romero's groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead, zombies are metaphors for people under the overwhelming chains of social injunctions to fit in. The zombies are symbols for racist America, for rigid family structures that inhibit us, for sexual repression that forces us to devour ourselves.

WEST AFRICAN VODUN ZOMBIES
Vodun, or Haitian Vodou, or the Voodoo of Louisiana, is a system of spiritist beliefs based in earth magic. One noticeable doctrine of this religious amalgam of shamanism and animism is the existence of the Houngan, the priest or priestess, the medicine man or witch doctor. The houngan is a combination of doctor, judge, elder and executioner in a Vodun community. In a situation where a troublemaker in the community is guilty of some serious malfeasance, the houngan is called on to take matters in hand. Using a coup de poudre made of a tetrodotoxin from the fugu, the blowfish, and hallucinogenics and disassociates like datura, the houngan "kills" the person. Later, he digs up the corpse and reanimates it. Actually the person was never dead. He was in a deep catatonia which mimicked death. When the houngan removes the person from his grave, he is somnambulistic and is made to work as a slave in the houngan's fields.

This form of frontier justice is satisfactorily workable in the vodou community. Scientists may dismiss the existence of a coup de poudre, assessing the symptoms as a self-induced schizophrenia, psychogenic amnesia or other psychological manifestation of a deep belief in one's guilt and the houngan's power. In any case, the existence of these culturally specific zombies is pretty authentic.

TECHNO-ZOMBIES
The third and most common type of zombie in existence today is the techno-zombie. The symptoms of this zombification are a glassy and unblinking stare after playing World of Warcraft for more than eight hours straight, the far-off glare of a man arguing into his bluetooth, or the unnatural laser-beam intensity of concentration of a kid with hyper-developed thumbs playing a video game. The ability of technological pastimes to rob the human brain of higher cognitive functions and reduce it to a barrage of alpha-wave emissions is a terror even Hollywood would have been ashamed of to imagine.

Learn more about this author, John Devera.
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