Ross Payton, director of the horror comedy Motor Home from Hell, is also the podcaster behind Role Playing Public Radio and the author of two roleplaying books, Curriculum of Conspiracy and Road Trip. Most recently, he is the author of Zombies of the World, a social history of zombies and a field guide to twenty species of the living dead. “I kind of wrote it from the standpoint of a scientist who is very pro-zombie, but it’s not a very enlightened world,” he says. “Even the zombie rights activists are focusing on not shooting all the zombies.”
As you might expect if you have read Zombies of the World, Payton cites a wide range of influences for his work. “Obviously, films were a large part of it, but there were several real books,” he explains, covering the spectrum from Peter Dendell’s The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia through the stories of H.P. Lovecraft (whose characters are referenced throughout the book) to B,ullfinch’s Mythology and a 1904 text on Japanese folklore calledKwaidan. He also cites Japanese horror films and comics like The Walking Dead as inspiration. “I tried to touch all the bases,” he says. Some of those bases might be unexpected to the casual zombie fan. “One book that was an inspiration was called Dancing at Armageddon, and that’s a book, actually, about survivalists. I wrote a paper for a pop culture conference comparing the zombie genre to survivalists.” He adds “There are several books that I’ve read on zombies and pop culture and academia, and I can’t remember when I read them; it’s sort of an ongoing topic for me. “
Payton turned that enormous body of research and inspiration into a concise zombie field guide. “One of the first things I did,” he says, “was write a list of every potential monster I could call a species of zombie. Anything that was undead but not vampiric, I kind of used or thought about using.” Wanting to go beyond the dichotomy between fast zombies and slow zombies, he “started examining each of the common tropes you see in zombies” and put together a list of 20 species of walking (or hopping, or dancing) dead drawn from film, literature, and folklore from around the world.
In developing the fictional social and evolutionary history of his zombie species, Payton asked himself “If zombies were real, how would they be in the real world?” It turns out that “there’s actually a precedent in nature,” for zombies, and Payton can cite well-documented examples. “It’s pretty horrific,” he says enthusiastically. “There’s a type of fungus called cordyceps that infects insects, particularly ants, and what they’ll do is they’ll mind control the ant to alter its behavior to go to the highest branch possible so that it’s highly visible, so it can be eaten by something else, and that helps the fungus spread.” Zombies of the World, he conceptualizes zombies as a similar kind of parasite, and points out that “the zombie microbe, or whatever it is, is harmless until it has something to control.”
Such a parasite would not have spontaneously arisen out of nowhere. “They would evolve over time. You wouldn’t go from zero zombies to billions of zombies overnight, which is kind of the norm.” Too many zombie stories, in Payton’s opinion, “treat zombies as being outside of history. They show up en masse and nobody knows how to deal with them. If zombies were real, people would have incorporated them into their worldview, because that’s what they do, even with relatively extraordinary things.”
There are plenty of extraordinary things in Zombies of the World, and some are stranger than others. One of Payton’s more surprising creations is the Dancing Zombie, which he said is a nod to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Payton explains that all zombies are psychologically motivated; they have no biological need to eat and cannot actually digest anything they consume, so the drive to feed on human flesh is purely psychological. He also cites the example of the Revenant, which “is psychologically motivated by the desire to murder, to get revenge. Why would their motivations all be murderous? Why wouldn’t there be essentially a harmless species with a desire so deeply ingrained into it that it wants to dance, to entertain us, to create art?”
In fact, despite the ravenous and deadly creatures cataloged in Zombies of the World, Payton reminds readers that humans are more likely to cause the “zombie apocalypse” than are the zombies themselves. “The zombie apocalypse would probably happen due to overreaction on our part, using nuclear weapons on a zombie-infested city, which would cause a cascading effect on the environment. You’d kill a few of the zombies, but you also destroy a whole city’s worth of infrastructure and resources, and you have a bunch of radioactive zombies now. When panic or bad decision-making happen, what can save you from that?”
That grim possibility is why he says zombies are enjoying such popularity in recent years. He traces the zombie genre’s history beginning with the debut of I Am Legend in 1954. “You have over a decade between that and Night of the Living Dead, and then you have Dawn of the Dead in 1978, and from 1978 to 2001 they’re kind of relegated to low-budget B movies,” which horror fans liked well enough but the general public was mostly unaware of. “It started changing in 2002 with 28 Days Later,” Payton says, and “then, of course, you have 2003, the Max Brooks survival guide, and everyone’s thinking about it.” That timing lines up in interesting ways with society’s history, according to Ross Payton.
Drawing on his own research on the survivalist movement, he explains that the idea of survivalists is that with “the right consumer goods, the right firearms, the right dry rations, and if they learned the right skills, they could survive a nuclear war with the communists. That was very popular in the 1980s,” he says, and in fact worried citizens were digging bomb shelters well before then. Survivalists “kind of died down with the fall of the Soviet Union and kind of bubbled up again in the Clinton era” with events like the Branch Davidian incident, Ruby Ridge, and the Oklahoma City Bombing. The parallel Payton draws is that during these periods of identifiable threats, the zombie genre remained relatively obscure.
“The finale of it is the Y2K thing; they freak out about that and then realize that wasn’t going to happen. A lot of people still have these insecurities about living in this world, but there’s no convenient Soviet Union to be afraid of.” Two years later, 28 Days Later revived zombies in the popular imagination.
In the contemporary age, society faces “vague amorphous fears” and “nebulous threats” like terrorism and epidemic disease. Payton says zombies provide a useful outlet for these fears. “You aren’t crazy if you’re a zombie apocalypse fan, because everyone knows it’s a joke. It’s a way of indulging or massaging those insecurities without being a conspiracy theorist. People think it’s relevant because people don’t necessarily think zombies are going to show up anytime soon, but yeah, society is unstable.”
In the face of that instability, zombie stories are almost comforting in at least one way. “Zombies are a cozy catastrophe; it wipes out the world, but there’s no inconvenience to it. The mall is still there.”
Fortunately, so are the bookstores, because Ross Payton is writing a novel set in the Zombies of the World universe. “Writing a novel is a totally different beast,” he says. “Writing one narrative as opposed to a bunch of shorter standalone chapters is a very different process.” Entitled Dead Power, the story is set in “a scientific research facility, and they have all these zombies that they’re studying. One group of the zombies gets loose, obviously. The government is going to bomb the island unless the human staff and some of the intelligent zombies work together. The Talking Zombies are very untrustworthy because they’re addicted to human flesh, and they want to eat your brains, but they’re smart enough to realize that if they eat the humans, they’ll be bombed, and they won’t survive. They work together, and they survive the airstrike.” Dead Power should be available in the spring of 2012.
As for his own favorite undead literature, Payton says “of course, there’s I Am Legend and of course there’s World War Z. I did read a steampunk zombie novel, Boneshaker, by Sheri Priest; it’s very good, and I enjoyed that quite a bit. His favorite zombie movie, he states, is easily Night of the Living Dead. “I saw that as a kid; this was the first movie I saw period as a kid that had such a dark ending. Every human character dies in it. It’s so primitive; it’s like you’re watching surveillance footage somebody smuggled out, a home movie, not a real movie. I didn’t realize movies could be like that.”
Payton observes that “the zombie is a great monster for a lot of different reasons. It shows what we are when the rules of society and civilization break down, and they show us what we’ll be sooner or later- we’ll be dead.”
To see more of Ross Payton’s work, including a web series based on the book and a Zombies of the World blog, or to order copies of Zombies of the World, visit zombiesoftheworld.com.
An unedited transcript of the interview is now posted on One Day at a Time.
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