Swain - How to make a zombie: the real life (and death) science of reanimation and mind control

A Oneworld Book

First published by Oneworld Publications 2013

Copyright Frank Swain 2013

The moral right of Frank Swain to be identified as the Author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988

All rights reserved

Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

Illustration credits
Prologue/Epilogue: Zombie hand pated/Patrick Ellis/iStockphoto
Chapter 1: Haitian voodoo ritual photo by Jerry Cooke
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Chapter 2: Doctors Transferring Blood Bettmann/Corbis
Chapter 3: Woman leaning over laboratory table by George Skadding
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Chapter 4: Electrodes are implanted in the brain of a schizophrenic
by John Loengard Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Chapter 5: Scientist Theodore Tahmisian observing a grasshopper colony
by Al Fenn Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Chapter 6: Rabies sign, England, 1989
Science & Society Picture Library via Getty Images
Chapter 7: Medicine eye by Tony Linck Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

ISBN: 978-1-85168-944-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-78074-099-7

Cover design by Matt Lehman
Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

Oneworld Publications
10 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3SR

For Mum and Dad
who gave me everything

You see them every day, these zombies; theyre all around you.

They shamble across the cinema screen on broken limbs and snatch at girls with long blonde hair. In the closeness of your home they explode in satisfying blossoms of rotting flesh at the flick of a trigger. Their scabby hands reach out at you with stiff cardboard fingers from the comic-book display stand. When you walk home at night, you catch them in silhouette, stumbling through the shadows, confused, drunk and lost. They sit slack-faced opposite you on the bus, their will ground away by the constant rasping of the parasites buried deep in their skulls. And as you walked in duty-free sandals over the soft ground of the tropics, did you not stop to see the quiet graves where infant wasps lay spring-loaded in the chests of their comatose prey?

Wait, you think you know what a zombie looks like?

Sure, you think you do. Youve seen the movies, and committed their model organisms to memory. Perhaps, in the spirit of first principles, you rented out White Zombie, the 1932 horror classic that gave birth to the first cinematic adventure of the undead. Here you watched Murder Legendre slip poison to Madeleine Short, leaving her apparently dead, only to awaken in a tomb as Legendres mind-controlled slave. Less than an hour of reel time later, the spell is broken, and Short shows no evidence of being anything less than living. The white zombie of the title refers not to Shorts death and resurrection but to her state of mind. Death is merely a misdirection, a convenient way for Legendre to throw Shorts cuckolded husband off the scent. The conjurers real treachery is transforming his human victim into a willing, compliant automaton.

Perhaps you like your zombie movies more visceral. The sorcerers zombie was killed off by George A. Romero in 1968, when the young director turned his mind to the last days of the living. Borrowing heavily from Richard Mathesons doomsday novel I Am Legend , Romero wrote a script that replaced vampires with hungry ghouls, and set the action at the beginning of mankinds extinction instead of at the end; he called it Night of the Flesh Eaters . The distribution company, Walter Reade, wanted something sexier, so the title Night of the Living Dead was slapped onto the title sequence, instantaneously granting zombies with an entirely new physiology and epidemiology. To some extent, Romeros zombies were the inverse of those created through Legendres witchcraft: though they had little will of their own, no one was controlling them. Granted, they had a gruesome taste for human flesh, and the ability to break the rules of biology these shambling corpses seemed to be suspended between life and death.

This is not a book about fictional zombies. This is a book about what happens to the zombie when it crawls off the page and out of the screen and into our world, the really real world. What must a zombie do to make that journey? Could we hijack another persons body and compel it to follow our every command? Could we die and come back again?

Death is supposed to be the end, an inviolable law of nature. Were distinguished from the gods by virtue of the fact that we will die and they never do thats why were called mortals. Through time and across cultures, cautionary tales have been passed down about those who attempted to break this covenant. Even Orpheus, who managed to descend into the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, could only watch in horror as she was snatched away again on reaching the surface. And of course we have only to look to Mary Shelleys infamous Frankenstein to find a warning against the hubris of overturning such sacred laws through the wonders of modern technology. It seems that the desire to control the body and the mind lives large in our imaginations, but what taboo hasnt been tested?

How to Make a Zombie is filled with true tales that will keep you awake at night. Our journey, if you are prepared to come with me, starts in the fetid heat of the Caribbean cane fields, where witch doctors grind skull bones into poison and shadowy bogeymen snatch children who stay out after dark. These sorcerers corrupted the fantasy of an eternal soul that lives on without a body, creating instead a monster whose physical flesh lives on without a soul. Well watch as secret societies stab deep into the human psyche to prick two of our greatest fascinations: our desire to cheat death, and the fear of losing our humanity. From there we fly to the bitter snow-blown streets of Moscow and the gaslit rooms of Londons surgeries where necromancers build machines that can breathe life into the dead. They are challenged in this race by American scientists who hope to build a master race with their own brand of immortality techniques. On the shores of a quiet alpine lake in Switzerland, a physician slices gently into the brains of his disturbed patients, while colleagues half a world away attempt to stitch the psychic wounds of unhappy people with gossamer wire and electricity, and gangsters in the jungles of Colombia prepare for their next furtive heist by ripping leaves from a borrachero tree. All of them hope to gain purchase on the brain some to treat, others to take control. Well pass along the black market trade routes that course from Eastern Europe to South Korea, a global conveyor belt on which the dead are disassembled and fashioned into parts for the living. And across the world, in the air and underfoot, well be pestered by invisible armies of assassins bugs, worms and fungi that press into the flesh of unsuspecting victims and whisper incredible commands from their new homes.