First Walk, Then Run, Then Stand: "Standers" & the Shambling Ambulation of Undead Behavior in Popular Zombie Culture

Reprinted with permission of Please Stand By Magazine

“The dead are standing on their graves”.

The overnight appearance of human corpses that just stand on their graves as presented in the upcoming novel “Standers” by Dale Brumfield (http://www.standersnovel.com/, Iron Cauldron Books) harkens back to stories that originated in the Afro-Caribbean spiritual system of Vodou (anglicized voodoo) that described people, dead or otherwise, as being controlled by an outside or interior force.

The concept of the walking dead first gained popularity in modern era fiction with the publication of H.P. Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West: Reanimator”, in which a medical doctor injects a serum into the dead that reanimates them. The 1976 book “Illuminatus!” describes Nazi SS officers who come back from the dead to slaughter a quarter million attendees at a Bavarian rock festival. Since 2000 a zombie craze took hold, and too many books to count have been published following the same basic descriptions of the undead portrayed as lumbering, murderous cannibalistic shells of their former selves, roaming the countryside and committing heinous acts. “Standers” breaks that mold.

There are several possible etymologies of the word zombie. One possible origin is jumbie, which comes from the Carribean term for ghost. Another possible origin is the word nzambi which in Kongo means ‘spirit of a dead person’. The Merriam-Webster dictionary claims the word zombie originates from the Louisiana and Haitian Creole word zonbi, which represented a person who died and was then brought to life without speech or free will.

The followers of Vodou believe that a dead person can be revived by a sorcerer, but after being revived, the undead remain under the control of the sorcerer because they have no will of their own. Another theory claims that a sorcerer uses a ‘zombie powder’ as a powerful neurotoxin that temporarily paralyzes the nervous system and creates a state of hibernation.

Very different from the vodou and the folklore zombies previously described, modern zombies follow a specific standard, similar as seen the plethora of books on the subject and in the movies. These ghoulish marauders are portrayed as mindless monsters who do not feel pain and who have an insatiable appetite for human flesh. They are characterized by being undead, cannibalistic (a misnomer, since they eat the living and not other zombies) and slow-moving, with a sole aim to either kill, eat or infect people. These reanimated undead show signs of physical decomposition such as rotting flesh, discoloured eyes and open wounds.

The Burning House from "Standers"

While these descriptions certainly apply to the zombie personification as portrayed in the cinema since George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” and those movies and TV shows made since, the zombies portrayed in films prior to that groundbreaking film were portrayed more like those as described in early folklore. In the 1920 German expressionist classic “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, the victim, known as “Cesar” was referred to as a somnambulist but behaved according to the standards of zombie behavior as described by the Afro-Caribbean legends: a mindless hulk catering to the bidding of his master, the bug-eyed Dr. Caligari. The later films of the 1930s and 1940s, including “White Zombie” and the classic “I Walk with a Zombie” portrayed them similarly with more sinister instincts infused within by a more dastardly mentor. A smattering of forgettable films in the 1950s and early 60’s pretty much buried the genre until George Romero brought them up out of the ground and off the slabs to become murderous mindless hulks in 1968.

These modern zombies as portrayed in fiction and movies are often related to an apocalypse or Rapture scenario, where societal segments have broken down or entire civilizations have collapsed due to a cataclysmic man-made, natural or even a supernatural event. Background stories of zombie movies (and even video games) are purposefully vague in explaining how the zombies appeared in the first place. While some can blame radiation, air-borne viruses or disease mutation, none can explain how sickly, rotting corpses somehow break out of their coffins and get up out of the ground.

“Standers”, on the other hand, does not shy away from how and why the dead came up out of the ground – it is for very specific reasons that are quite terrifying.

In “Standers”, as is typical with almost all zombie or undead-themed stories and movies, overly-aggressive tactics are used to contain the (un)dead. Hard line government quarantining is utilized to stop potential infection, and in theory is hoped will result in eventual suppression. These results assume that the timescale of the outbreak is short. If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is a certain doomsday scenario: a potential zombie outbreak that results in the collapse of civilization in general.

“Standers” takes the zombie/undead genre a lurching step in a wholly different direction – it is zombie culture for grownups. Using the tagline “The dead are standing on their graves”, standers do not stagger, walk, run, moan for brains or even attack the living; with minor exceptions they just stand there. Society wakes up one morning to find all the dead are standing on top of their burial place, then everything collapses because people do not understand why the dead are standing, and cannot anticipate what the standers will do next.

A 60-second video trailer for the book on YouTube and Vimeo, directed by the author’s son Hunter Brumfield, shoots a country road through the windshield with the noise of someone twisting a radio dial, trying to find something other than unsettling news reports and bizarre government announcements reminding us in a chipper voice as the car turns into a field that it is illegal to “touch or otherwise engage a standing corpse”. The headlights eventually stop on 9 or 10 standers in an old family cemetery as the voice implores that we “have a nice day”.

Read “Standers” if you don’t mind sleeping with your light on. For a month.

Standers

Written by Dale Brumfield

Edited and published by Beth Brown at Iron Cauldron Books .

Standers Video Trailer #1 and the upcoming trailer #2 directed by Hunter Brumfield; starring Doug Dobey, with John Ferguson, Zack Ferguson, Grace Huddleston, Hollis Brumfield, Jake Brumfield, Melody Milliker, Joey “Pepperoni” Purvis, Tina Eschleman, Olivia Harrison as the standers, with Don Harrison as the Beaver. Kudos to Irene Ziegler Aston for the voiceover and Susan Brumfield for driving.

“Standers” will be available both as a paperback and as an ebook nationwide March 31, 2012.