Zombie Science: Biting the Hands that Feeds - Anatomy of a Zombie Bite

The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

We humans as a species are very protective of our bodies. The mere thought of getting sick and being brought to our knees from within by our own immune system will make even the strongest of people quiver in fear. In the dark ages it was believed that illnesses and ailments were 'bad spirits' or curses and were met with sometimes primitive treatments, that is until the late 1800's and the discovery of bacteria by Robert Koch. Through the modern medicine of today we've discounted superstition and old wives' tales as myth and fallacy in favor of establishing legitimate scientific medical proof of living organisms as the cause and developed appropriate treatments and vaccinations to illnesses that may have proven life-threatening to prior generations. Yet in spite of all our amazing breakthroughs and medical advances the fear of bodily invasion has never changed. This is why a zombie, literally, embodies our worst fear come true.  

Like so many predatory creatures found in nature, a majority of a zombies' power comes from the fear of its bite (next to their abundance in numbers and seemingly adept hunting ability). We've known for years that a bite from a zombie has proven fatal 99.999% percent of the time but we've never analyzed why. Let's look deeper shall we?

A living human mouth is rife with up to 100,000,000 organisms per mL of saliva (as many as 190 different species) residing on every tooth and in every crack and crevice. These bacterium serve many different functions within the mouth, some are helpful and aid in the pre-digestion of food or fight disease for example while others can cause something as minor as bad breath or cause serious illness. The number of bad bacteria is reduced if the individual makes good oral hygiene a regular habit.

You ever forget to brush your teeth before going to bed one night? That film covering your teeth and gums the next morning when you wake up is plaque, oral bacteria, that grows rampantly in the human mouth. If left unchecked, this plaque will transform into a veritable Petri dish of bacteria and fungi since the mouth has perfect conditions to support growth at an alarming rate.

Now imagine this person has been dead just long enough to begin putrefication before reanimation. You've got a whole new set of bacterium trying to eat away necrotic tissue along with whatever was previously living in the person's body. Also, throw in the fun variable of whether or not this zombie has been eating someone or not.  

Give us a big kiss

Why?  You ask.  Zombies just LOVE entrails. They seem to have a particular fondness for intestines. Our guts are just full of even more fun gastrointestinal flora that normally help us digest the food we eat and excrete the waste. Add a heaping dollop of this into our lovely stew of microbes and you have Howard Hughes' (or Howie Mandel's for that matter) worst nightmare. You ever notice how a zombie's favorite spot is to go for the trapezius muscle in between the shoulder and the neck/carotid artery? Picture all this filth and nastiness entering into your bloodstream, put the entry site near a major artery or venal system and you're essentially dead within the minute. The resulting massive infection is what causes a bitten person to expire. The human immune system is only so strong and it cannot fight all the infections off, so the system fails and the subject dies allowing for resurrection.

Split personality anyone?

Treatment with all known disinfectants such as povodone iodine, isopropyl rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide; antibiotics from penicillin to the worlds’ strongest anti-virals have proven ill-effective. The only known 'cure' for a bite from mortiis viventiis is the immediate death of the bitten subject via decapitation or significant trauma to the brain. 

Sidenotes:

-A note about the strength of a human jaw:

From the website of dental health:

"Normal chewing places about 68 lbs/sq inch of pressure on the back teeth. If you intentionally clench your teeth you may increase that force to about 150 lbs/sq inch. However, an individual who clenches and grinds their teeth subconsciously at night can place up 1200 lbs/sq inch of force.  Sounds like an industrial grinding machine!" [1]

-Amputation should never be considered a viable treatment. The chances of catching the infection before it gets into the bloodstream are minute

-With amputation there is the SERIOUS risk of exsanguination (bleeding to death) unless a proper tourniquet is applied and the bleeding stopped, also there is greater risk of infection at the amputation site

 -The resulting outbreak from untreated zombie bites is simple mathematics. Infection is a simple equation: You start with one zombie (Patient Zero as it has been known), this one becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight and so on and so forth spiraling outward exponentially until the human population is gone.

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[1] Dental Health Library Article Bite and Occlusion

 http://www.dental--health.com/biteocclusionpohl.html

Song of the Week: Bad Moon Rising

Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.

Greetings boils and ghouls! It's your Humble Narrator Shadow Jerusalem here tonight with a very special edition of Song of the Week.

Well if you happen to be outside tonight and look up you'll notice it's a full moon. Kinda makes you want to get where you're going all the quicker doesn't it? Any horror enthusiast knows that the full moon is when any lycanthropy-beleaguered individual undergoes their monthly transformation to full-blown werewolf (or wolfman such as it is).
The moon has been getting a bad rep since the ancient Greeks and Romans, they believed it caused mania or insanity in an individual, hence the term lunacy.
John Landis' 1981 classic An American Werewolf in London. Two American students hiking through the English moors are attacked by a wild animal on a full moon, David survives only to be haunted by the rotting corpse of his friend Jack insisting he kill himself before the next full moon. Well needless to say David doesn't heed his advice and come the full moon... let's just say things get hairy.

This transformation stands out to me because it's done fully lit, in plain view and without the usage of CGI. Rick Baker (King Kong, Hellboy, too many others to name) was the creative genius behind the werewolf effects not only in this movie but worked on Joe Dante's The Howling, Mike Nichol's Wolf, Joe Johnson's 2010 remake of The Wolf Man and last but certainly not least the scarily delightful music video to Michael Jackson's Thriller

But the song of the week is what plays just prior to his transformation

So for tonight this is your lycanthropic pal Shadow saying, beware the moon stay on the road, and load up the silver, it's the ONLY way to kill a werewolf
Now if you'll excuse me my 5 o'clock shadow is getting bushier and I feel the need for raw red meat

Song of the Week: Earth's Final Hour

"I'll point out the folly of man to ya!"

So this is a special video to me since it was a vision that was shared by my friend Schiefer aka RoguePred to my ShadowHunter from the old Gamegossip and Aliens vs Predator forums back in the day. I shared the idea of Manson's "Last Day on Earth" to the original Gojira (Godzilla, King of the Monsters here in the states). What turned out still gives me the chills to this day!

"Hi kids! Wanna play?"

Take Gojira, a movie rife with heavy social commentary about the horrors of man gone awry and filter it through the madness that is another modern version of man's indulgences, sin and vices and thrown back in our face in the form of Marilyn Manson in his song "The Last Day on Earth" from his Mechanical Animals album. The album itself conveys an overall cold sense of unfeeling, mechanical as it were and the lyrics are equally cold and dark like walking through snowflakes in the dark. Cheers Rogue, keep up the good work and we'll see you next time!

Seattle's Darkest Day

This is a story of something cool that occurred behind the scenes at zomBcon here in Seattle last year. It was late September and I'd been working on an article about George Romero's Day of the Dead for the ZomBcon Blog and decided that without an eye-catching piece of artwork, my prose would be nothing more than a bunch of words on a webpage that no one would want to read. So after some poking around online I stumbled across a scan of an old video store advertisement for Day. This would do the job nicely I figured.
Having little to no skills in photography or the creation of cool artwork myself, I called in a favor to my friend Tim Szczesniak of Fade To Black and told him my idea. I wasn't thinking anything too complicated: edit out the text and adding something recognizable like Space Needle would be sufficient enough to tie the image to Seattle; seeing as how Seattle Center was slated to be Ground Zero for the event.
What Tim came back with blew my mind and was way more than I had expected but was damned amazing. My first thought was "He knocked this one clear out out of the park!" This is Tim's image for my article Seattle's Darkest Day

"Seattle's Darkest Day" Tim Szczesniak

 So I showed the image to Ryan Reiter, the President of ZomBcon International, just to clear it with him before it went up on the blog. Apparently it struck a chord because he immediately asked if we had his permission to use the image. He does some tweaks and edits of his own and suddenly it's going into this week's edition of The Stranger as an ad. I'd ask my friends smugly, "So, uh, you see this weeks' Stranger?"
People would respond, "Oh yeah, I saw that zombie and thought of you... did you have anything to do with that??" I'd just smile evily...
Later it would undergo further edits and revisions to later become the main image for our convention flier.

 

Bub in The Stranger

When the West Was Dead Part 1: Dead West

Greeting boils and goils, creeps and creatures of the night, welcome to the first installment of a series I once had an idea for but never saw to fruition. When the West goes dead basically, the first installment comes complete with an interview with author and writer Rick Spears.

Welcome to Lazarus, a small blooming town in the Old West. Don't expect to live long if you visit it though, the town's under a curse. "In this town nothing stays dead for long..."
Many years ago there was a tribe of Native Americans living where Lazarus now stands. Everything was peaceful until one day, the white man came to lay claim the land as their own. The Chief believes there is no way one can "own" the land. The white men return to wipe them all out and kill all but one, the Chief's son. With his dying words the chief tells him to remember what took place that day.
The son kept his promise and years after it had all been forgotten he unleashes an ancient curse in the cemetery by taking his own life thus bringing the dead back to life, just like old biblical Lazarus himself.
A tall steely-eyed bounty hunter chases his mark across the desert and into the town not knowing the danger the lies in wait. As a result he's drawn into a Mexican standoff between his fat mustachioed bounty who has sought refuge with a sherriff who doesn't take kindly to bounty hunters in his town and the entire undead population of Lazarus led by the Chief's son who is on a personal vendetta of his own to avenge his tribe and honor their memory.

The Man With No Name faces off against the living dead

Fans of the spaghetti western and classic zombie films need to head no further than Dead West. Dead West was written by Rick Spears and illustrated by Rob G. Single Bullet Theory got a chance to talk with Rick Spears, author of Dead West some time ago but now it is being unearthed for your reading pleasure:

Single Bullet Theory: I loved the story, to me it played out like a Sergio Leone film if directed by George Romero. This was one of the first times I'd ever seen the old west turn into something out of a Saturday night horror movie, where did you draw your inspiration for the story?

Rick Spears: Yeah, Rob and I are huge Leone and Romero fans. We had just finished our first comic series Teenagers From Mars and were tossing around ideas for a new project. i can't remember who said it first but doing a Zombie Western popped up and it just sounded like too much fun not to do. We talked a lot about style and tone with Leone and Romero as guideposts and then just went for it.
Being fans of the spaghetti western were you fans of Italian zombie movies like Lucio Fulci's Zombie?

I'm a big fan of everything Fulci! The zombie shark fight is one of the greatest scenes of all time!
I love his horror, westerns, and giallo films. The Beyond and Zombi and Four of the Apocalypse are my favs.

The characters bear striking resemblance to a certain blonde and a certain ugly fellow, was this coincidence?
No, we were pretty blatant about our character influences.

And the sheriff?

The Sheriff was more of an evil Henry Fonda ala Once Upon a Time in the West.
How d'ya think the Duke woulda handled things had he rode into the town of Lazarus instead of Blondie? D'ya think ol Rooster woulda fared better or worse?

Well the Duke has his own style but ultimately the result would be the same...lot's of spilled brains!
What sort of movies did you grow up on as a kid?

I grew up with HBO playing all sorts of awesome movies late night. Then every weekend was all about riding bikes to the video store and haunting the racks in search of the goriest trash we could find. So yeah, lots of horror, slashers, zombies, euro stuff... I love the Universal monsters too. Can't wait to see those on Blu-Ray!
Which of the Universal Monsters was your favorite? I was always a Creature from the Black Lagoon kind of guy when I wasn't watching monsters destroying Tokyo.
Man, that's really a hard one. The Creature was always cool because he was so original. But in all honestly it was love at first sight with Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein.

Most of the Universal Monsters have a certain tragedy about them: Dracula lost his love, King Kong was brought out of his world and into ours and Frankenstein was created out of dead tissue. Even Godzilla was the mistaken product of nuclear testing. In your opinion do zombies have this kind of tragedy to them as well, or do we view them as we would a shark (just an unsympathetic killing machine born and bred)?
I think zombies have (or should have) a lot of tragedy in them. For me, Dawn of the Dead played it best with the zombies stumbling around the mall. "We" are what become zombies, mindless flesh just going through the motions. Being eaten alive is a primal fear but so is the fear that you could loose our humanity, or individuality and become just a mindless part of the mass, just a consumer. When played up in a zombie story that always resonates with me. Getting eaten alive hopefully will never happen but we all could very easily become just a worker drone mindlessly going about our life, just another tax paying, product consuming, cog in the machine. For me that's a terrifying tragedy.

When it comes to mixing genres, did you ever see Red Sun with Charles Bronson and Toshiro Mifune? Would you consider throwing a samurai and adding a dose of Kurosawa into the mix for a potential sequel?

Red Sun, holy hell, I've never seen it. Just watched the trailer on YouTube and it looks amazing. I'll have to track it down. Yeah, Samurai and westerns have a real nature overlap. I mean A Fist Full of Dollars was basically a remake of Yojimbo. We looked at a lot of Blade of the Immortal comics as we were doing Dead West and that is something I'm sure we would explore in a sequel.

Are there any plans for a sequel?

Rob and I have batted around a couple of ideas, but we're only interested in doing a sequel if we can really bring something fresh to the table. We're not interested in repeating ourselves. We'll see.
Do you and Rob have a Z-Day plan?
Rob is half zombie already so he'd probably just blend right in. I may have a shotgun and a "go bag" at the ready but that's all I'm saying. Loose lips sink ships.



We'll check ya'll later on the trail when the riding gets rough and Rotten with Mark Rahner.

NECA's San Diego Comic Con Exclusive 8-Bit Jason Vorhees figure

So it was excellent news when NECA announced that they were to be showcasing an exclusive figure at SDCC of Jason Vorhees as he appeared in the original pain-in-the-ass original Nintendo game in his striking purple and blue outfit. I had to have this figure but getting it would be no easy task. Having been tagged by a close friend and the only person I knew that ever actually read anything I posted during my tenure at the ZomBcon saying she was at San Diego I put to the mission of tracking one down, only to find out they were already sold out. So that avenue closed I inquired to the website themselves and found they would have more the next morning. I was up early on a Sunday morning a half hour earlier than was instructed just waiting for my chance.Just upon chance I refreshed the page to find them live. I pounced and claimed mine and good thing as within minutes they were gone again. It would soon be mine!

Even the back of the box resembles the classic NES cartridge case! They went all out on their attention to detail front and back, inside and out. See below!

 

The inner display box shows the game over screen I saw time and time again which is cool while the actual box is a direct copy of the old Nintendo box artwork. 

Jason and his weaponry glow! 

Jason looks pretty cool out the box, but this picture is as far as mine will ever get. I only unwrapped the plastic to properly display the toy. Word is an NES Freddy is next... which I must have as well... mwahaha... enjoy the video and the rest of the photos courtesy of NECA.

    He glows!

Oh if you were lucky enough to KO him, this is what you saw in victory! Jason laid flat on his ass!

Yup his mask is removable and whooeee is he ugly as ever! He comes armed with an axe and a machete!

 

And now the infamous music from the game that haunted my youth

It's a Long Hard Road Out of Hell

Well 2013 is off to a much better start than the 2nd half of 2012 was. First off it's 2013, 13 being my lucky number and so far it ain't bad. I've spoken at length about my trials and tribulations as of late, thankfully the worm turned in my favor finally and I've been able to start seeing my kiddo again. Only thing is I'm running on a burnout schedule between work, school, homework, the kiddo and doing anything to make ends meet financially... oh yeah and attempting to have something resembling an actual life.
That said I managed to finally watch a few good movies recently when I can catch a break from all the action lately. Seven Psychopaths, Django Unchained and Cabin In The Woods were recently on  the bill in my living room and they all were fantastic movies. I don't have the time to go into detailed reviews of them currently but all I can say is check them out!
Seven Psychopaths is a great flick from the same directors of In Bruges, so if you're a fan of witty gritty black comedies I highly recommend it.
Django Unchained is Tarantino finally doing an actual old Western revenge flick in his trademark style reminiscent of a Leone style spaghetti Western. Great movie but clocking in at just under 3 hours it is quite the lengthy one.
Cabin in the Woods is not your typical let's-kill-all-the-stupid-college-kids type of movie, it's far more dark and sinister than it makes off to be in the first half hour. It's cliched for the sake of being cliched and for good reasons. Lots of nods and homages to characters, events and creatures that make the horror genre so great in the first place.
So that's all for now folks, I promise I'll find time to go into greater detail on these flicks and I still have intentions on getting some other reviews posted that have been swimming in the depths of my brain for awhile. Until then... ta ta