The Science of Monsters

More than fifty years later, the legacy of Night of the Living Dead continues. Zombies have been inculcated into the cultural zeitgeist alongside vampires and slashers. The concept of reanimation, and the ultimate betrayal of a family member or friend coming back from the dead to snack on your brain, still terrifies. Although, now that many of us have become more sophisticated in our viewership, quite a few have come to complain about the inconsistencies of body decomposition in zombie films and television. One target of this social media murmur is the aforementioned AMC hit The Walking Dead. Fans on Twitter and beyond began to ask if the show was accurately representing how a body would decompose over time. In 2015, MTV News even interviewed forensic anthropologist, Kimberlee Moran, to explain the body decomposition on the popular TV series. Moran describes that the zombies on the series “would have all kinds of parts of their body dropping off of them all the time, until they become a skeleton.”² To further our understanding of how real bodies would act under the extreme and thankfully unreal affliction of zombification, we interviewed a medical expert about death and the body decomposition in George Romero’s first two films—someone Meg and I (Kelly) both know (who hides his eyes while watching horror movies and even screams at the frightening scenes!)—Meg’s husband, Dr. Luke Hafdahl, an internal medicine physician at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic.

Meg:“In horror films, including Night of the Living Dead, we see actors ‘die.’ Can you tell us how a body reacts to death in its immediate stages?”

Dr. Hafdahl: “Generally speaking, when someone is dying, there are two roads to death. Most people simply become withdrawn, lethargic, and eventually comatose. They stop speaking. Their breathing becomes altered and, often, you can hear a sound called the ‘death rattle,’ a rattling sound in the chest that comes from vibrating secretions. People’s fingers become blue from lack of blood flow.

The other road to death is less common but much more dramatic, called ‘terminal delirium,’ in which people become agitated, confused, hallucinate, restless, and begin having involuntary muscle jerks. When people die, the color immediately drains from their face and they develop an ashen appearance. Still, it can be hard to judge if they are alive without checking for a pulse.”

Meg:“Well, I guess that explains that pale zombie pallor!”

Kelly:“Are there any diseases or conditions that make someone seem as if they are dead?”

Dr. Hafdahl: “One of the more terrifying syndromes is called pseudocoma or locked-in syndrome in which someone has a stroke in their brainstem in such a way that their consciousness is preserved (they are completely aware of everything) but they lose their ability to move their limbs, speak, and swallow. They can communicate only by blinking or moving their eyes up and down (they often cannot move their eyes from side to side).”

Kelly:“That is zombie like, not having control over your own body.”

Meg:“What about a sort of partial death? Zombies seem both alive and dead.”

Dr. Hafdahl: “Certainly, you can see a spectrum of death. People can have parts of the body die before the brain, like people with peripheral vascular disease where their blood vessels are too narrow to deliver blood and nutrients, so their limbs essentially die and need to be amputated (gangrene). Strokes are essentially partial brain death, where a part of the brain dies from a lack of blood flow, so whatever is controlled by that part of the brain dies (i.e., if they have a stroke in the speech center, they have slurred speech, if they have a stroke in the motor cortex, they develop weakness in half of their body, etc.).”

Kelly:“In Night of the Living Dead ‘fresh’ zombies have pale skin, walk stiffly, and sometimes moan. As a man of science, what advice would you have given George Romero about how a zombie should move or act?”