Where are zombies in real life? Scientific explanation for the existence of zombies. What did the zombie say?

How the dead come to life

Zombies are dead people zombified by a sorcerer who obey his will. They cannot talk and do not understand human speech, but they can growl or moo. The sorcerer controls the dead using special spells from voodoo magic. Anyone who is interested in such magic will give a positive answer to the question “do zombies exist.” A voodoo sorcerer has the power to steal the soul from a living person.

To do this, he needs to perform a series of magical rituals and read a spell. After the soul has been stolen, it is imprisoned in a vessel, which is kept in the sorcerer's bedroom. Through spells cast over the stolen soul, contact is established with the body deprived of it. After this, the person whose soul is possessed by the sorcerer quickly dies: the heart does not beat, the pupils do not react to light in any way, there is no breathing... But if you try to cut any part of his body, blood will not ooze from the wound.

When the right day comes, the sorcerer and his “companions” go to the cemetery where the deceased is buried. Drums, songs and dances, combined with sacrificed white chickens, do their job. Next, the sorcerer digs up the dead man and performs special rituals to revive his body. When he comes to life, the voodoo sorcerer begins to mercilessly exploit him.

Free labor

Do you think there is a zombie worker? Yes, and exactly a worker! The sorcerer uses the living dead as free food on the plantations!

Of course, sometimes the sorcerer needs zombies to deal with his haters, but, nevertheless, their main purpose is hard work on plantations or in mines. The most important thing about this is that the dead man does not need to be paid anything for his work, he does not need to be fed, and he will not go on strike! These stupid creatures are physically strong, which allows them to work much longer than living people, and besides, they never get tired! Why not an employee?!

An interesting fact is that before America was conquered, namely before black slaves began to be imported to American and Brazilian plantations, in Europe they knew nothing about zombies!

How to kill the living dead?

If an evil sorcerer decided to set his dead “slave” on you, then keep in mind that killing a dead man will not be so easy!

After all, who are zombies? This is a piece of walking flesh, controlled by someone else's evil will and does not feel pain from wounds. The living walking dead is not affected by silver bullets or garlic. There are only two ways to destroy zombies:

• chop the dead man into small pieces and then burn them;
• cut open a dead man's skull, destroying his brain (if we believe current ideas about zombies)

Where do zombies live?

In general, zombies appear wherever evil voodoo sorcerers live, and this is mainly Africa, Haiti, Latin America, United States.

Do zombies exist in Russia?

Since the climate of our country is not very conducive to the above-described many-hour dances with tambourines in cemeteries and other scrupulous rituals, voodoo sorcerers do not particularly take root in Russia. And since there are no sorcerers, there are no their perverted “brainchildren”. But whether there are zombies in Europe is an open question, because this is where the birthplace of evil spirits (mainly vampires) is located - Romania and Transylvania.

So, in this article we brought to your attention the classic version of the appearance of zombies. Today more and more more people they are talking about the end of the world, which will be caused by the so-called zombie apocalypse. A lot of TV series are being filmed on this topic, and I must say, they are widely popular among viewers. Whether zombies really exist is something everyone decides for themselves. For example, the legendary film actor Brad Pitt has already turned his attention to the problem of the uprising of the army of the living dead by starring in a thematic film! Let's take an example from him and think, what if the dead are already starting to break their coffins in order to get out of the damp burial ground into our bright world... Oh, and then we will have a hard time...

A real zombie, like a real UFO, is not so easy to come across. We have long dreamed of such an acquaintance - and we couldn’t think of a better occasion than the eve of Halloween. Realist found a zombie specialist - and learned from him the whole truth about the living dead and the places where they can be found.

Alexander Goliusov— Candidate of Medical Sciences, writer. As part of the program to combat malaria in Africa, he worked in Nigeria and Ghana. Engaged in research into the zombie phenomenon.

Where do zombies come from?

Legends are made up about zombies and mysterious stories are made up. In cinema alone, there are three main versions of the origin of zombies. The first is that zombies appeared as a result of a radiation anomaly. The second is that the zombie state is influenced by microorganisms. But the third version corresponds to reality. And according to it, classic zombies are people whom the sorcerers-shamans of the voodoo cult plunge into an unconscious state, and then into a state of drug intoxication.

Are there real zombies?

It is impossible to answer this question negatively. Even our interaction with you, an interview, is an attempt to influence me, and leading me to the desired or “correct” answer is an attempt to zombify me. People generally “zombify” each other every minute through manipulation. But to find out if classic zombies still exist, you need to go to Haiti.

Is it possible to revive a dead person using a virus?

Such cases are unknown to science and, by and large, it is impossible. Firstly, after biological death, irreversible cell death occurs in organs and tissues, starting with the nervous one. Secondly, the virus reproduces only in a living cell. And thirdly, the microorganism must be so universal that it can simultaneously perform the functions of all systems of the dead macroorganism: it will have to replace blood cells in order to carry oxygen, conduct impulses instead of dead cells, and so on. The virus cannot do this. It has a fairly simple structure - as a rule, it is DNA and RNA molecules protected by a shell.

The theme that zombies exist and the apocalypse for humanity is inevitable has not left television screens for many years. People believe in a certain virus that turns a sane creature into an inadequate animal capable of killing and feeding on human flesh.

Zombie virus

Assessing the real behavioral picture characteristic of the “walking dead,” a scientist from the University of Maryland, whose name is Jonathan Dinman, compared the image of the cinema with the real symptoms that the rabies virus leads to. Rabies is characterized by several stages.

1. The first stage is accompanied by the development severe pain in the head, rapid heartbeat, the patient is suffocating. The symptoms provoke extremely negative behavioral reactions, consisting of aggression, the inability to distinguish reality from fiction, and increased excitability.
2. The second stage, which is also the final stage, provokes the manifestation of animal instincts and the shutdown of the human mind. Literally, the virus provokes insanity, manifested in attacks on people, animals and transmission of the disease through a bite.
3. With the development of the second stage, a person completely degrades and no longer resembles a rational being; he bites and tries to tear the flesh of his victims with his nails. The picture is very similar to the characters in science fiction, so there is a real reason to think about the scientist’s hypothesis.

If we assume that the rabies disease undergoes a mutation, the virus cells will change their DNA. A possible scenario for the development of events is the transition of the virus to chronic form, which does not mean death due to disease, but chronic exposure virus on the body, then the fiction about the zombie invasion will come true.

General concept

Zombies have long existed as entertainment characters from the world of fantasy.

The word means a dead person who was revived with the help of a virus or a person who came under the influence of magic, which led him to the state of an unconscious, aggressive creature. They are unable to control their actions and actions; the creature wanders the streets all day and night in search of food.

Also, a fantastic image can mean a real person from the modern world, who, like a “zombie,” believes in propaganda on TV and does not part with his gadget. The term “human zombification” is used to mean negative impact a sect that people join.

Origin

The terminology comes to us from the traditional religion of African peoples, called Voodoo. There are many versions describing the exact origin of the name:

• the statement that the word comes from “nzambi”, which means “spirit of the dead” in African;
• other sources attribute the origin to the word “jambi”, used in West Africa, meaning - bringing;
• there is a statement that the word was used in relation to the mythical African snake, which was considered the enemy of heat and sun.

The theory of resurrecting the dead comes from the belief of Voodoo, in which sorcerers are credited with superpowers that allow them to return the dead to the world of the living and enslave them. Japanese mythology is famous for its prototype of a zombie, which is represented as the spirit Buso, feeding on human flesh.

According to legend, spirits appeared from the dead by starvation. They are described as humanoid creatures, with wrinkled, distorted faces and bodies, prowling the night streets in search of prey to eat.

In the United States, the concept of zombies came with William Seabrook’s book “The Frame of Magic,” which tells about the life of Haitians and their beliefs. While living in the house of a local witch, William witnessed the performance of various rituals, which, according to him, are a mixture of 2 faiths: Catholicism and Voodoo. Of the 4 volumes devoted to the American’s stay in Haiti, volume 1 is devoted to the zombification of people.

The book made an impression and became the ancestor of interest in the image of the creature. Since 1932, cinema has begun producing films about the resurrected dead.

1. "White Zombie" (1932);
2. "King of the Zombies" (1941);
3. "Revenge of the Zombies" (1943).

With each new film, the theory of origin and image of the character changed more and more. Zombies became not people subject to the will of others, but the dead, risen for cannibalism.

The psychological side of zombification

Do zombies exist in reality: psychology explains the phenomenon of the fantastic genre in its own way, characterizing it as an impact on human thinking. Zombification occurs through influence on the human central nervous system through suggestion, which is produced through advertising and the use of hypnosis.

Due to its unfoundedness, the theory has not taken its due place in scientific research.

Concept in art

IN modern world art, the image of the character has taken root in all directions:

• literature;
• movie;
• theatrical performances.

The image of zombies is used everywhere and is even interpreted into classics of world literature. This is how the novel Pride, Prejudice and Zombies was created, written in a mashup style by writer Seth Grahame-Smith. It is based on the text of Jane Austen's novel, into which episodes created in the horror genre are inserted.

There is a whole series of books by A. Cruz called “The Age of the Dead.” The books contain a huge number of ideas about the invasion of the living dead, who have mutated thanks to a virus created to help the living. The books describe ways to survive when attacked by living corpses.

In America, they even created a survival plan in case of a zombie attack, a very real one, the Armed Forces worked on its development.

For many years, countries in Europe and the CIS have been holding a procession called the “Zombie Mob,” during which people take to the streets en masse and organize joyful festivities and flash mobs. Participants in the procession must dress and make up like real zombies.

Conclusion

Zombie is a collective image. To date, the real origin of the image and its veracity have not been clarified. Whether to believe in the existence of the living dead or not is everyone’s business, but it’s still worth familiarizing yourself with the theory.

The popularity of zombies has long gone beyond the horror genre. The “living dead” have become children's favorites, fighting with plants in children's games. They are one of the typical enemies in fantasy shooters and TV series. They become an element of youth design in clothing. Are the chilling horrors really a thing of the past, and today no one cares whether a zombie apocalypse is possible? Let’s try to figure out how relevant this topic is and what is the likelihood of the “living dead” appearing on the streets of modern cities.

Do zombies exist in real life?

Creatures with rotten flesh, growling and pulling their hands and teeth towards the brains, are overgrown with many stories, legends and superstitions. They appear in mystical thrillers and melodramas, youth comedies much more often than their “colleagues” vampires, adding a bit of humor or symbolizing the oppressed sections of society. In the world of cinema, the living dead are constant extras, which are divided into two main categories:

1. Classic zombies are corpses risen from the grave, often not distinguished by intelligence and intelligence.
2. The living dead are the result of a certain pandemic that has turned most of humanity into aggressive carnivorous creatures.

What about reality? It is reliably known that zombies in the original sense are not an invention of Hollywood directors. The word comes from one of the African languages ​​and means “Soul of the Dead.” To the question “Who are zombies and do they exist?” the voodoo priest will answer in the affirmative, adding that he himself would not mind acquiring a couple of copies for working in the garden.

1. The ritual of turning a person into an obedient slave indeed exists in this religion, but does not imply his real death. In Haiti, such practices are illegal.
2. For the potential zombie ritual, the sorcerer needed puffer fish containing a strong nerve poison - tetrodotoxin. A person who tasted the voodoo priest's potion fell into a coma.
3. Relatives mourned and buried, and then the “dead man” came to life - the poison was removed from the body. However, the “zombie” was too confused and scared to return home. The sorcerer constantly drugged him narcotic substances and forced him to work.

The fictional “living dead” are distinguished by incredible vitality and strength. They are able to find victims by sound or smell. Neuroscientists have even published a book on the topic of the zombie brain to humorously understand the functioning of these strange creatures. In Andrei Cruz’s book “The Age of the Dead,” the infected have a terrifying effect, demoralizing not only ordinary survivalists, but also professional military personnel. Let's consider whether a zombie apocalypse is possible in real life.

• Even an army of obedient slaves of a voodoo priest, not paying attention to pain and bullets, is not capable of causing a global catastrophe of civilization. A horde of this kind can easily be stopped by ordinary police or a special forces squad. The sleeping gas is enough to make them no longer dangerous.
• In the event of an epidemic, the virus will be quickly localized and investigated. So far, there is not a single strain that turns a person into a superzombie. Sick people are weakened due to pathological disorders in the body and are not often able to bite even a doctor. The plague epidemic caused significant damage to Medieval civilization, but the problem lay in population decline.
• The functioning of a living person requires the coordinated work of many systems. After death, an irreversible process of decomposition occurs. The risen zombies will not be able to growl, or even walk. Although their behavior can be explained by disorders of certain parts of the brain, stories of voodoo or an epidemic still remain more plausible.

Should we prepare for a zombie apocalypse?

Behind the crowds of aggressive “living dead” lies the fear of war, devastation, and the collapse of civilization. All this has already happened before, is happening now and will happen in the future without any participation of living or infected creatures. In the natural world, zombies also have a place.

The theme of the transformation of most of the planet's population into hordes of zombies roaming the streets, hunting for a handful of survivors, has been exciting minds for decades. Interest in zombies either subsides or resumes with renewed vigor. Interestingly, the main supplier of films, games and books about the risen dead is the USA. Moreover, it is there that they prepare for the zombie apocalypse seriously and with all responsibility. For example, we recently wrote about upcoming exercises in Kansas that simulate the end of the world with the living dead, and in the spring of this year it became known that they also have an action plan in case of such a cataclysm. And this is not counting the numerous “survivors” who stock up in their bunkers with canned food and crowbars to break the skulls of living corpses. So why is the topic of zombie invasion so concerning to Americans? Let's try to figure it out.

We will not touch on the mythological origins of the term “zombie,” since more or less everyone knows about voodoo, and Haitian zombies are very different from those half-rotten herd cadavers that we are used to seeing on movie screens. For the same reasons, we will skip the film “White Zombie”, turning directly to the great and terrible George Romero, who gave us the film “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968, setting the clichés and framework of a new genre - zombie horror. True, the director did not use the term “zombie,” replacing it with the word “ghoul,” which can roughly be translated as “ghoul,” but it was journalists who “zombified” Romero’s walking dead.

True, Romero himself has repeatedly stated that zombies in his films are nothing more than a symbol of the average person who does not want to think, is subject to the herd instinct and is ready to kill those who are not like him. However, later Romero revised his view of the living dead, making them in “Land of the Dead” almost Nietzschean supermen, raising a rebellion against a completely rotten world order. But in general, zombies for the director remained a metaphorical image of the silent but aggressive majority.

Despite the rather transparent hints with which Romero literally hit the viewer in the forehead, the average person never recognized himself in this “zombie mirror”, but began to fear the external form - the real living dead.

It didn't take long before zombies took over popular culture, appearing not only on movie screens, but also on the pages of comics and books, and later video games. The family tree of the walking dead has branched out, presenting to the public both absolutely creepy running zombies (“28 Days Later,” a remake of “Dawn of the Dead”) and even intelligent (“Land of the Dead”) zombies, as well as comical (“Carrion Alive”), touching ( “Zombies named Fido”) and even romantic (“The Warmth of Our Bodies”) cadavers.

Nevertheless, the fear of hordes of the undead hungry for living flesh is deeply imprinted in the subcortex of the ordinary American man in the street. Gun stores, seemingly as a joke, began producing anti-zombie kits, which, however, did not include toy machetes, knives and shotguns. The son of the famous comedian Mel Brooks, Max, added fuel to the fire by releasing his famous “Zombie Survival Guide,” which formed the basis for the truly scary and realistic (unlike the film adaptation) “World War Z.”

The generation that grew up watching the films of Romero and his imitators today occupies key positions in the American government, and the fear of the living dead prominences is breaking through into the activities of serious government agencies. As mentioned above, the Pentagon has at its disposal plan CONOP 8888, which provides for actions to repel an attack by a horde of the living dead and maintain public order among the survivors. True, the military claims that the image of zombies was chosen in order to avoid any political allusions, but it is difficult to imagine that Chinese paratroopers or Islamist sabotage groups would act like herds of the living dead, mindlessly darting under machine-gun fire, covering up fire points with their bodies.

State Governor Sam Brownback gives approximately the same reasons for conducting exercises in Kansas, arguing that “if you are ready for a zombie apocalypse, you are ready for anything,” and the theme of the living dead is used solely to create additional excitement around ordinary exercises to practice actions in emergency.

Don't avoid zombie themes and tools mass media, periodically releasing news that, even if they are canards, inevitably make the heart beat faster, deep down, bypassing rational arguments common sense, causing doubt: “What if?”

In 2002, for example, a “zombie” was reported to have washed ashore on the island of St. Thomas, part of the US Virgin Islands. According to local newspaper reports later circulated around the world, the body of a man “with severely flayed skin” washed ashore. When the police arrived on the beach, the drowned man jumped to his feet and attacked the law enforcement officers. At the same time, several shots at the body, fired by confused policemen, did not produce any effect, and the policemen were forced to make a tactical retreat, throwing away their service weapons. However, among the onlookers who had gathered to look at the dead man, there was one brave guy who picked up a pistol and shot the walker three times in the head, laying him on the ground. The body was later taken by military doctors, and the further fate of the “zombie from the Virgin Islands” is unknown.

In 2012, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, known, however, for her eccentric behavior, started talking about the zombie apocalypse. Before the significant date of December 21, 2012, when the world was supposed to end according to the Mayan calendar, she said she would protect Australians from any threat, including “bloodthirsty zombies.”

All this, of course, is funny, but in reality there are cases of zombie behavior. Also in 2012, on the streets of Miami, police shot and killed a man who attacked a tramp and literally gnawed his face off. According to police, the victim was missing skin on his forehead, lips and nose. At the same time, in order to kill the cannibal, it took six shots - what is not the same invulnerability of zombies? Later, several more similar cases were recorded, and in all cases the attackers were under the influence of a synthetic drug, better known as bath salts.

Drugs are drugs, but all these cases show that there are areas in the human brain that, when activated or disabled by chemical or other means, cause him to hunt and literally devour his own kind alive, while increasing the pain threshold and, probably, increasing muscle strength and reflexes. According to Tim Verstynen and Bradley Wojtek's study, Zombie Diagnosis: Brain and Behavior, that area of ​​the brain is the amygdala. In general, there is good scope for the imagination and research of chemical weapons developers.

This also includes wasps that lay eggs in the body of spiders, forcing them to weave protective cocoons for the wasp offspring instead of webs.

There is no need to talk about rabies, or rather its second stage: aggressiveness and “superhuman” strength are some of the symptoms of the disease in humans. But even the flu virus can control a person. Binghamton University of the State of New York noted that participants in the experimental group that were inoculated with the influenza virus, instead of quiet and measured life suddenly developed social activity, attending crowded parties and bars, where it was easier for the virus to spread.

It turns out that by genetically modifying the same cordyceps or the causative agents of rabies and toxoplasmosis, scientists may well obtain a zombie virus. And if he breaks free, then we won’t have to hope for a successful outcome: according to research by University of Ottawa professor Robert Smith, humanity will have very little chance in such an outcome. For example, a city with a population of 500 thousand will turn into a horde of the living dead in just three days if there is only one infected person in it. Neutralizing the threat is possible only through clearly calibrated and well-organized massive attacks on walkers and a serious complex preventive measures, which is difficult to implement in the conditions of chaos that ensues in such a case.

It turns out that the danger of a zombie apocalypse, although not very high, still exists, and perhaps we should not ridicule those “survivors” who dig bunkers, stock up on provisions and blow off the heads of life-sized targets at shooting ranges.