Psychological Perspectives
A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought
ISSN: 0033-2925 (Print) 1556-3030 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/upyp20
The Zombie Archetype: Living in a Viral Culture
Lee Weiser
To cite this article: Lee Weiser (2015) The Zombie Archetype: Living in a Viral Culture,
Psychological Perspectives, 58:4, 442-454, DOI: 10.1080/00332925.2015.1092807
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Psychological Perspectives, 58: 442–454, 2015
c C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles
Copyright ISSN: 0033-2925 print / 1556-3030 online
DOI: 10.1080/00332925.2015.1092807
The Zombie Archetype: Living in a Viral
Culture
Lee Weiser
When psyche brings forth monsters, it is always wise to take a close look.
When the active imagination of global culture fixates on a particular kind
of monster, there’s a veritable treasure trove of hidden meaning and valuable psychological information to be unearthed. Zombies warrant closer
scrutiny for several reasons: (1) They are currently enjoying a place in
the cultural spotlight; (2) they embody the loss of will and the disempowerment that occurs in so many of the situations humans fear and loathe
the most; and (3) they are remarkably flexible metaphors that stand in
as symbols for social ills as disparate as viral pandemics, the evils of technology, and the chaos that threatens to take over in the face of political
collapse. What is behind the popular appeal of the brain-devouring quest
of the walking dead? Can the lure be linked to globalization and the inevitable sharing of biohazardous particulates among the people of the
world? Or can it be further reduced to a manifestation of the primordial
fear of death itself? This article examines zombies across time and place
and finds them to be worthy representations of the specters of frightening forces that hunt down and haunt the living.
I
survived an encounter with a deadly virus. Maybe. When I was 8 years
old a wild animal bit me. A gopher. I spotted the buck-toothed rodent
ambling along at a slow-enough pace for me to reach down and scoop it up
for a better look. I got a warning bite on my hand, which earned the gopher
a quick release. Lesson learned: Do not handle wild animals; they bite.
My story might have ended very differently had not the yard monitor
realized how unusual it was for a gopher to be out and about among children on a playground. I was sent to the school nurse, who dispatched me to
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LEE WEISER THE ZOMBIE ARCHETYPE
443
Pamela Freundl Kirst, A California Native Sunflower’s Petals
Twist and Curve, as the Center Busies Herself Making Seeds,
digital photograph, 2014.
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a nearby medical clinic where the doctors immediately began administering
a painful, preemptive treatment regimen consisting of injections of human
diploid cell vaccine, using a very long needle inserted into my tender abdomen. This was repeated every day for two weeks just in case the gopher
was rabid. My only consolation was that there were other children who also
had gotten bitten that day and had to undergo the same treatment.
Rabies (from the Latin word for madness), found on all continents
(except Antarctica), is an extremely lethal virus (from the Latin word for
poison) that has plagued mammals since their beginning. The victim of the
virus, be it beast or human, gets infected from the bite of an uncharacteristically aggressive animal that attacks without provocation. The bullet-shaped
rabies virus makes a beeline for the nervous system, where it begins to modify the behavior of its host in order to facilitate its own transmission to other
victims. Some time after being bitten, the victim displays hyperactive behavior, violent movements, and hydrophobia (a fear of water due to difficulty
with swallowing: thus the foaming mouth). Even human victims have been
known to bite. Alternatively, confusion sets in along with hallucinations and
the inability to move parts of the body, followed by a loss of consciousness.
Regardless of which behavioral pattern manifests, death is almost certain within 2 to 10 days after the first neurological symptoms appear. An
average of 60,000 people die from rabies annually and more than 15 million
people receive post-exposure prophylaxis every year (World Health Organization, 2015). The number of people who have survived a full-blown rabies
infection without receiving post-exposure phrophylaxis before the onset of
symptoms can be counted on one hand.
I survived the encounter with the agitated gopher and never gave the
episode another thought until researching cross-cultural practices around
death and dying for a graduate course I was teaching. My research kept turning up mythological material referencing aggressive behavior on the part of
dead people who were out to devour the living. These mythological flesheaters had various names, but their descriptions sounded a lot like the fictional zombies, currently starring in television and movies, who become zombiefied by way of viral infections.
Pop culture and mainstream media interest in zombies has spread like
a contagious disease. Zombies have infected literature, film, music, social activism, protest marches, news, art, television, performance art, social media,
comics, anime and manga, gaming, television, toys, and have even infiltrated
government websites (Zombie Preparedness, n.d.). Although I am not ordinarily a fan of violence or gore and have yet to view any episodes of shows
featuring zombies, or see any zombie flicks, the timeless popularity of zombies captured my attention. I wanted to take a closer look at zombies to pinpoint why they are such a widespread phenomenon. Here is what I found:
LEE WEISER THE ZOMBIE ARCHETYPE
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1. Zombification exists in nature.
2. Zombies appear in mythology across time and place.
3. The word zombie derives from West Central Africa and is connected
to Caribbean culture as a result of slave trade.
4. Zombies hold projections of biological and metaphysical fears.
5. The zombie archetype is emerging as a symbol of the viral culture in
which we live.
Z OMBIES IN N ATURE
Zombies actually exist. There are two types of zombies in nature: aggressive
and docile. The aggressive type is an organism aberrantly driven by some
foreign biological invasion (virus, fungus, parasite, etc.) to violently attack
others (think rabid dog), whereas the docile type is an organism whose actions passively conform to the desires of another (examples to follow). These
seemingly opposite behaviors are not so different. Both involve the loss of
self-control; both express disempowerment of individual will.
The rabies virus induces the aggressive type of zombie-like behavior.
Wild animals typically shun humans, but rabid animals such as bobcats, otters, beavers, raccoons, foxes, skunks, peccaries, donkeys, and even lambs
have been known to go all-out kamikaze on human targets. With uncharacteristic aggression the afflicted animals will chase, menace, attack, and bite
humans, other animals, and even cars with a vengeance that resembles a
zombie attack (Wasik & Murphy, 2012).
The docile type of zombie is exemplified by the case of the cockroach
turned zombie nursemaid when the emerald jewel wasp uses sequential injections of zombifying venom in three precise locations to cause the cockroach to enter a state of hypokinesia. Under the power of the wasp’s venom,
the cockroach allows the female wasp to lead it by the antennae, like a dog on
a leash, to an underground lair, where she lays her egg on the roach’s body.
A week later, while the roach is still alive and semiparalyzed, the egg hatches
and the squirming larvae eats its way into the body of the roach, where it
lives for a month, chowing down on roach innards. The roach dies when the
new jewel wasp, fully formed, exits the roach’s body and flies away (Zimmer,
2012).
Another docile zombie is created when parasitic flatworms infect
the delicate eyestalks of snails. The snail’s slender eyestalks swell up
like psychedelic barberpoles and begin to pulsate green, yellow, red, and
black, looking a lot like delicious dancing caterpillars. Ordinarily, snails seek
out dark, hidden places to conceal themselves from predators, but these
flatworm-infected zombie snails with barber-pole advertisements for eyes,
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climb into higher, well-lit places and stay there, pulsating attractively to capture the attention of hungry birds, who eat them and become hosts for the
rest of the flatworm’s life cycle.
The dominant form of life on our planet is microscopic. “Only about
one out of every ten cells between your hat and shoes is human. The other
nine belong to the masses of bacteria that coat our skin, live in our guts, and
thrive in our mouths” (Wolfe, 2011, p. 254). A plentitude of microbes roam
the earth, looking for victims to zombify. There are numerous examples in
nature of fungi, eukaryotes, parasites, worms, bacteria, viruses, prions, and
other pathogens that reproduce themselves or take up residence in zombified hosts by using a particular strategy of complex chemical overrides to
upset the neural impulses of the host organism and cause aberrant and abnormal behavior. They invade cells, alter neurotransmitters, destroy neurons,
change hormones, and transmit behavioral commands. “Since microbes generally can’t walk or fly from one host to the next, they often strategically alter
their host to help in their spread” (Wolfe, 2011, p. 30). Zombification is body
invasion and mind manipulation of the most intimate kind.
A dead body is the perfect host for bacterial reproduction. The bacteria
cause the body to become a discolored, bulging-eye, bloated mass of liquefying organs and tissue that release toxic-smelling gas. During the ages before
germ theory was proposed and accepted, it was commonly believed that the
dead could spread revengeful plagues upon the living in retribution for harm
done during life.
Z OMBIES IN W ORLD M YTHOLOGY
The earliest record of a possible zombie apocalypse, scripted in cuneiform
on Sumerian clay tablets, circa 2000–1400 B . C . E., relates the epic story of
the mythic king of Urek (present-day Iraq). The goddess Ishtar, angry at not
getting what she wants, threatens to knock down the gates of the netherworld and let the dead come up and eat the living. She promises that the
dead will outnumber the living.
The Viking sagas contain tales about the “strange life and power” that
reanimate the dead body placed in a grave (Ellis-Davidson, 1943, p. 96). The
corpse lived in the grave as an undead person, deprived of the comforts of
home and the company of others, thus envious of the living. The haugbui
(from haugr meaning “howe” or “barrow”) lived within a stone burial chamber, rarely venturing out and fiercely guarding its treasures with teeth, claws,
and superhuman strength. But the draugr (dead-walkers), corpses of warriors immune to harm, would rise out of their graves and roam the countryside to attack the living. The propensity of dead bodies to swell to enormous
size undoubtedly contributed to the tales of the vast strength and size of
LEE WEISER THE ZOMBIE ARCHETYPE
447
these undead warriors who were said to be able to control the weather, predict the future, move magically through solid stone, and crush their victims
in several different ways.
Japanese mythology tells of the gashadokuro, undead skeletons created from the bones of those who starved to death. They grab humans and
bite off their heads. The Japanese nukekubi (detachable neck) detaches its
head from its body at night to feed on victims, first shrieking to scare its prey
before plunging its teeth into the victim’s throat (Nukekubi, 2014).
The jiangshi (hopping zombie), who originally appeared in literature
of the Qing Dynasty in China, is a reanimated corpse that hops as it moves
with out-stretched arms and seeks to suck the chi (life force) from the living.
The hopping form of the jiangshi may have evolved from the practice of
tying the stiffened body of the dead to a bamboo pole in order to allow it to
be moved by two people. In this upright position, the corpse would appear to
be hopping as the pole bearers walked along. The jiangshi has since evolved
into the star of a popular form of cinema and literature that mixes horror with
comedy in China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. A lightning bolt strike, the leap
of a pregnant black cat across a coffin, or the magic of a Taoist priest can
reanimate the recently deceased. Regardless of the cause of the turning, a
person bitten by a jiangshi is infected with a virus and will gradually become
a jiangshi too.
In the folklore of many countries of southeast Asia dwells a mythological creature with a dozen different names (Krasue, Kasu, Leyak, Ahp, etc.).
She has a detachable flying head complete with dangling entrails that twinkle
in the night to emphasize her voracious nature. She is nocturnal and goes out
to seek blood to drink or raw flesh to devour (Rajadahon, 1969).
In Central West Africa, it was believed that someone who died could be
brought back to life with magic, but once the dead were revived, they were
docile and had no will of their own. These powerless, undead people would
remain under the control of the sorcerer who brought them back and who
would force them into slave labor (Niehaus, 2005).
Z OMBIES AND THE T RANS -A TLANTIC S LAVE T RADE
When the native people of Central West Africa were captured and transported to the New World to feed the ever-growing demand for slaves, they
brought with them their beliefs about supernatural control over others. Accounts differ as to the etymology of the word zombie. It may have come into
English use from the West Indian word jumbee, which means the spirit of an
evil dead person. There are many kinds of jumbees, reflecting the complex
history, multi-ethnicity, and folkloric traditions of the West Indian people.
Different cultures have different concepts of jumbee, but the general idea is
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that people who have been evil in life are destined to become instruments of
evil after death.
Jumbee most likely derives from the Kikongo word for fetish (zumbi).
With a fetish, one could control others. Unsuspecting tourists visiting ritzy
Jumby Bay Island in the Caribbean might be told that it is named after “playful spirits,” but belief in the jumbee is held by practitioners of dark magic
and sorcery. The jumbee, like the American boogieman, casts a sinister figure. Creolized forms of the Kikongo language are found in the ritual speech
of African-derived religions practiced in places where the slave trade was
especially prolific, including Brazil, the West Indies, and in particular, Haiti.
Haiti was, at one time, the world’s largest slave colony. The idea of
docile zombies germinated there under the heartless and harsh conditions of
oppression, where lives were lived with complete loss of control. The Haitians
“do not fear the zombies themselves (who are only mindless and pathetic);
rather, they fear becoming a zombie under the wrong circumstances and
against their will” (Haiti and the truth about zombies, n.d., par. 6).
Stories about zombies served as a form of social control. Papa Doc, an
alter ego of Francis Duvalier (1957–1971) who ruled Haiti during the 1960s,
was well aware of the grip that voudon had on the rural masses and used
it to his advantage. Even his fashion was designed to capitalize on voudon
mythology.
He affected the staring gaze, whispered speech and hyperslow
movements recognized by Haitians as signs that a person is close
to the voodoo spirits. He solicited the allegiance of voudon priests
in the countryside, often bringing them to Port-au-Prince for
presidential audience, and he encouraged rumors that he possessed supernatural powers. “My enemies cannot get me!” he
used to exult to his followers. “I am already an immaterial being.”’ (Time Magazine, 2011)
Haitian followers of the vodoun religion believe that a bokor (sorcerer)
can temporarily paralyze the human nervous system and create a state of hypokinesia using ritualistic potions made of crushed bones, ash, plants, and
neurotoxins. The victims of these rituals appear to be medically dead, but after they are buried, the bokor removes them from their graves and sells them
into servitude. Although they show no physical scars of zombification, they
suffer brain damage as a result of the poisons and are recognized by their
“docile natures, their glassy empty eyes, the nasal twang to their voices, and
by the evident absence of will, emotion, and memory” (Davis, 1988, p. 60).
They are left with only one ability: to work. Imagine people reduced to a
nonhuman state, and made to work endless hours.
LEE WEISER THE ZOMBIE ARCHETYPE
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There are no empirically verifiable studies that have been conducted
on the Haitian zombie poisoning phenomenon and it is generally regarded as
improbable by researchers (Littlewood & Douyaon, 1997), but the fantastical idea of zombification was exploited by writers as early as 1929. Zombies
entered the American psyche by way of a book called The Magic Island
(Seabrook, 1929) in which the author, an occultist, cannibal, and travel journalist, wrote about nine human corpses taken from graves and reanimated
to work as field laborers on a sugar plantation as if it were a factual account.
During the years that followed publication, Haitian zombies were featured
in numerous American films, including Revolt of the Zombies (1936), King
of the Zombies (1941), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Revenge of the
Zombies (1943), and Valley of the Zombies (1946).
Z OMBIES G O V IRAL
It wasn’t until the 1960s that movie zombies took on the putrefying appearance of decaying corpses and became the deadly flesh eaters that are commonly seen in films today. Other than the name (zombie), the only connection between the folkloric zombies of the voudon religion and zombies in pop
culture is the abject loss of self and will.
The folkloric zombie is
enslaved by other people;
the pop-culture zombie is
enslaved by biological error, infected with contagious
viruses that are easily spread
through bites or by radiationmutated diseases carried by
vectors or genetically altered
bees. The gait of these zombies is limping and lumbering,
the skin is discolored in various shades of bruising, and
the arms are held stiffly forward when they walk. These
biological zombies are decaying former humans who
mindlessly and aggressively hunt down and eat the living. Their victims are
thereby infected and turned into zombies, causing exponential growth in
zombie attacks, and leading ultimately to universal destruction.
Biological zombies have their beginnings in George Romero’s films
starting with The Night of the Living Dead. Romero called his flesh-eaters
In the wake of viral media
coverage of . . . an almost
endless list of harmful
pathogens, including
outbreaks of bubonic plague,
is it any wonder that the
zombie archetype is
emerging as such a
widespread phenomenon?
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ghouls, but their very zombiness replaced the idea of the zombie as a zonedout slave laborer in a Caribbean setting with reanimated, flesh-eating cannibals in urban settings. Romero’s original inspiration was a 1954 novel titled I
Am Legend, which popularized the concept of a zombie apocalypse brought
on by disease. In the novel, a war causes an ensuing explosion in the mosquito
population that brings about a virulent disease, but the cause of the pandemic
in many zombie movies remains mysterious and unnamed even as it follows
the viral pattern of self-replication and conversion. In the wake of viral media
coverage of AIDS, HPV, HBV, HCV, HHV-8, SARS, H1N1 (swine flu), H5N1
(bird flu), dengue, chikungunya, MRSA, measles, hantavirus, rotavirus, ebola,
and an almost endless list of other harmful pathogens, including outbreaks
of bubonic plague, is it any wonder that the zombie archetype is emerging as
such a widespread cultural phenomenon?
T HE Z OMBIE A RCHETYPE
If archetypes are about the origins of things, where is the origin of the zombie archetype? Research has shown that some stimuli such as spiders and
snakes are feared with higher probability than other life forms, which has
been explained in terms of biological preparedness (Gerdes, Uhl, & Alpers,
2009). We tend to develop fears of what may threaten our survival. This hypothesis has been widely accepted in biological psychology and abnormal
psychology, although the degree to which fear reactions can be better explained by cultural transmission than by biological preparedness warrants
further investigation. Media reports and fear mongering of deadly global viral
infections may enflame this biological preconditioning that, in its broadest
context, becomes a controlled stress that yields improved health outcomes.
Controlled stress mitigates the negative effect of later anticipated stress the
way that heat, cold, or hypoxia can protect against damage in the case of a
brain injury (Gerdes, Uhl, & Alpers, 2009).
Max Brooks, author of the Zombie Survival Guide (which recently
sold its millionth copy) who also wrote World War Z and a host of other
zombie-related books, says this about anticipated stress:
I think they [zombies] reflect our very real anxieties of these crazy
scary times. A zombie story gives people a fictional lens to see the
real problems of the world. You can deal with societal breakdown,
famine, disease, chaos in the streets, but as long as the catalyst
for all of them is zombies, you can still sleep. (as cited in Ogg,
2011)
Time magazine called zombies “the official monster of the recession”
(Grossman, 2009). There are zombie politics (social machinery that causes
LEE WEISER THE ZOMBIE ARCHETYPE
451
people to be so caught up with financial survival that they become like the
walking dead; Khuns & Giroux, 2010), zombie economics (economic ideas
that are not alive but not dead, just undead like Social Security privatization), zombie funds (near-dead private equity funds that tie up investors’
money and continue to rack up management fees, allowing no chance of
earning any interest), zombie banks and zombie companies (that have a zero
net worth but continue to
operate on government subsidies), zombie computers
(that are compromised by
hackers or viruses and used
remotely to perform malicious tasks), zombie rules
(a term coined by linguist
Arnold Zwicky, referring to
rules of grammar that may
have made sense in the
past but no longer apply),
philosophical zombies (indistinguishable from normal
human beings, except they
lack conscious experience),
zombie-pedia, zombie studies, zombie narratives, zombie experts, zombie survival guides, zombie
pub crawls, zombie walks, zombie runs, a worldwide zombie locator on
Google Maps, and World Zombie Day staged annually in 50 cities and celebrated in October, of course.
Zombies have generated piles of cash, too. They are an industry unto
themselves. The website 24/7 Wall Street estimated that the zombie genre
in its various guises generates well over $5 billion in revenue, and calls this
a grossly under-calculated figure, stating that the real figure is much higher
(Ogg, 2011). In 2014, The Walking Dead, a show about a zombie apocalypse, had the largest viewership in the 18–49 age group in the United States
(Hinckley, 2014).
War and social upheaval cause spikes in zombie movie production
(Newitz, 2008). Zombie narratives are a perfect fit for the fear-filled kind
of thinking that translates as apocalyptic. Even Maj. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the U. S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked military leaders, “Oh my God,
what are we going to do if the zombies attack?” (Barnes, 2014).
Zombies represent archetypal
aspects of the subjugated and
dehumanized Self rendered
powerless by attacks of the
aggressive “other.” [They]
reflect psychic fears inherent
in the human condition . . .
mixed with whatever
sociological anxieties happen
to be the most overwhelming
at the time.
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As elements of the collective unconscious that are expressed across the
world in dreams, myth, literature, tribal lore, and inherited patterns of behavior, zombies certainly fit the definition of archetypes. They are archetypes
of disempowerment. They symbolize the energies that invade and devour
the normal thought process and cause the loss of will and the depression of
agency. Being creatures whose earlier incarnations involved themes of slavery and whose most recent incarnations are as contagious cannibals, zombies represent archetypal aspects of the subjugated and dehumanized Self
rendered powerless by attacks of the aggressive “other.”
Zombies reflect psychic fears inherent in the human condition of the
slow inevitable pace of doom, mixed with whatever sociological anxieties
happen to be the most overwhelming at the time. These anxieties might include a workforce reduced to mindless automatons, individual traumas, escape from harrowing situations, rampant infections and plagues, widespread
violence, terrorist attacks, communal desolation, mass destruction, the doom
and gloom of human-caused climate change, the human-caused massive
death of honey bees, depleted water supplies, international instability, inevitable civil collapse . . . actually, the entire reverberation of social and psychological ills. Something is approaching and threatening mass destruction.
Everything known and trusted is falling away, and there is no secure ground
on which to stand. During a zombie apocalypse normalcy ceases to exist, and
in its place are shock, fear, and the desperate need to escape in order to
survive.
Though human beings are doomed to die from the moment of birth,
we dread even subtle psychological levels of death. Zombie narratives offer fantasies of escape from the universal experience of the darker sides of
human existence. If you can survive a zombie apocalypse, you can survive
anything.
Lee Weiser, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist who has specialized in depth
psychology and expressive arts therapy. She has been on the faculties of Antioch
University and the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, and she currently
teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, CA. She is also is a founding member of the Violet Solomon Oaklander Foundation.
FURTHER READING
Barnes, J. (2014, April 1). Gen. Dempsey finds military lessons in literature and a zombie attack. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/04/01/
gen-dempsey-finds-military-lessons-in-literature-and-a-zombie-attack
LEE WEISER THE ZOMBIE ARCHETYPE
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Davis, W. (1988). Passage of darkness: The ethnobiology of the Haitian zombie. Chapel
Hill, NC: UNC Press.
Ellis-Davidson, H. (1943). The road to hel. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Gerdes, A., Uhl, G., & Alpers, G. (2009). Spiders are special: Fear and disgust evoked by
pictures of arthropods. Evolution and Human Behavior, 30, 66–73.
Giroux, H. (2010). Zombie politics and culture in the age of casino capitalism. New
York, NY: Peter Lang.
Grossman, L. (2009). Zombies are the new vampire. Time. Retrieved from http://content.
time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1890384,00.html
Haiti and the truth about zombies. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.umich.edu/∼uncanny/
zombies.html
Hinckley, D. (2014, March 31). The Walking Dead is TV’s top show among viewers age
18–49. New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/
tv-movies/walking-dead-season-4-finale-draws-herd-15-7-million-viewers-article-1.17407
34
Littlewood, R., & Douyon, C. (1997). Clinical findings in three cases of zombification. The
Lancet, 350, 1094–1096.
Newitz, A. (2008, November 29). War and social upheaval cause spikes in
zombie movie production (Blog post). Retrieved from http://io9.com/5070243/
war-and-social-upheaval-cause-spikes-in-zombie-movie-production
Niehaus, I. (2005). Witches and zombies of the South African lowveld: Discourse, accusations and subjective reality. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 11(2),
197–198.
Nukekubi. (2014). Retrieved from http://monsters.wikia.com/wiki/Nukekubi
Ogg, J. C. (2011, November, 25). Zombies worth 5 billion to economy. 24/7 Wall
Street. Retrieved from http://247wallst.com/investing/2011/10/25/zombies-worth-over-5billion-to-economy
Rajadhon, P. A. (1969). Essays on Thai folklore. Bangkok, Thailand: Editions Duang
Kamol.
Seabrook, W. (1929). The magic island. Literary Guild of America.
Time Magazine. (2011, Jan. 17). The death and legacy of Papa Doc Duvalier. Retrieved
from http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,876967-1,00.html
Wasik, B., & Murphy, M. (2012). Rabid: A cultural history of the world’s most diabolical
virus. New York, NY: Viking.
Wolfe, N. (2011). The viral storm: The dawn of a new pandemic age. New York, NY:
Henry Holt.
World Health Organization. (2015). Human rabies. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/
rabies/human/en
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Zimmer, C. (2012, June 14). Parasite tales—the jewel wasp’s zombie slave.
Retrieved
from
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Zombie preparedness. (n.d.). Retrieved June 25, 2014, from http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/
zombies.htm