Rabid (22 page)

That decade also saw the publication of a seminal novel, one of the most important of the twentieth century, whose denouement hinges on a spectacular demise in the jaws of rabies.
Their Eyes Were Watching God,
by Zora Neale Hurston, details the life and romantic entanglements of Janie Crawford, a black woman from a modest upbringing in western Florida. After being raised by her grandmother, a former slave, Janie marries a much older farmer; is seduced away from him by a soon-to-be politician and entrepreneur; then finally (after the death of this brutal and abusive second husband) falls in love with a much younger man named Vergible Woods, known to all as Tea Cake, whose fraught and tempestuous marriage to Janie consumes the second half of the book. The pair move first to Jacksonville and then to the Everglades, where they live happily in a shack, planting and picking beans by day and socializing at night, as Tea Cake entertains guests with his guitar and then takes their money (or vice versa) in dice games.

Their reverie is eventually shattered by the arrival of a hurricane,
the ravages of which on their little shack prove to be the least of their troubles. Far more consequential, though neither is aware of this at the time, is the bite that Tea Cake receives—on his face, no less—from a shivering, furious dog they encounter while fleeing to safety. Perched improbably on the back of an almost wholly submerged cow, the dog “growled like a lion,” with “stiff-standing hackles, stiff muscles, teeth uncovered as he lashed up his fury for the charge.” Tea Cake wrestles with the dog and eventually drowns it, but not before it has clamped its slavering jaws upon his cheekbone.

Three weeks later, after the pair has fixed up a house in the Everglades and (they believe) resumed their life together, Tea Cake starts to complain of a headache. In the dead of night he wakes up in a “nightmarish struggle with an enemy that was at his throat.” The next morning, offered a glass of water, Tea Cake gags on it, dashes the glass to the floor. “Dat water is somethin’ wrong wid it,” he exclaims. “It nelly choke me tuh death.”

A doctor, summoned to Tea Cake’s bedside, warns Janie that rabies is the likely diagnosis. The only thing she can do now is to leave him at the County Hospital, where the staff can “tie him down and look after him.”

“But he don’t like no hospital at all,” Janie replies. “He’d think Ah wuz tired uh doin’ fuh ’im, when God knows Ah ain’t. Ah can’t stand de idea us tyin’ Tea Cake lak he wuz uh mad dawg.”

“It almost amounts to dat,” says the doctor, forebodingly. “He’s got almost no chance to pull through and he’s liable to bite somebody else, specially you, and then you’ll be in the same fix he’s in.”

By the very next morning, Tea Cake has descended into a paranoid fury. Seized with suspicions of his wife, he returns from the outhouse and draws his pistol on her. She has prepared herself for this turn with a rifle. She plants a fatal shot in Tea Cake just as he lunges and bites her on the arm. She is forced to pry her slain husband’s jaws from her own flesh.

Given the doctor’s explicit warning, we are left to wonder: Has
Janie herself contracted rabies from Tea Cake’s bite? Today’s rabies experts believe that the virus is unlikely to be passed from human to human via biting. But as the Hurston scholar Robert Haas points out, that possibility was often emphasized by doctors in Hurston’s time, and the doctor in her own book raises it. If Janie has been infected, we aren’t given any sense that a similar madness is settling on her. And yet it’s impossible to tell whether the window for infection has passed. The book both begins and ends at some unspecified time after the incident, when Janie returns to the town (Eatonville, Florida, Hurston’s own hometown) where she and her second husband had lived and prospered. At her trial for Tea Cake’s death—before, in a heavy irony, Janie is acquitted by an all-white jury that simply doesn’t believe killing a black man to be a crime—the doctor testifies to finding her “all bit in the arm, sitting on the floor and petting Tea Cake’s head.” Probably we are supposed to conclude, somewhat reasonably, that he treated Janie then for her possible exposure.

The other lingering question, of course, is how Hurston came to use rabies as a plot point in the first place. Critics and biographers have found the choice somewhat bewildering. Robert Haas points out that Hurston’s brother and first husband were both doctors, and her family had seven hounds while she was growing up; either of these might have lodged rabies in her brain, as it were.

But he also offers up a more intriguing and ultimately more plausible theory. At the beginning of 1936, as Hurston was writing her novel, a surprisingly popular movie about science played on screens all across the country. Its title?
The Story of Louis Pasteur
. Based on its gross of $665,000, Haas estimates that thirteen million Americans, or a full tenth of the population, would have seen the film—the entire last half of which is devoted to Pasteur’s formulation of the rabies vaccine. In New York, where Hurston was living at the time, it ran for the whole month of February and also received reviews in the daily papers. It’s only circumstantial evidence, to be sure; but we take a strange pleasure in the thought that the great Pasteur, while
alleviating the terror of rabies in the streets, at the same time helped to inject a dollop of that terror into one of the century’s great works of fiction.

It was also during the mid-1930s that the man who would revolutionize our ideas of the undead got his first taste of big-screen terror. The movie was
Werewolf of London
, and Richard Matheson was nine. “Somehow, I talked my mother into taking me,” he recalled. “And when Henry Hull”—who in the film played a biologist, Wilfred Glendon, bitten by a strange animal while conducting research in Tibet—“changed into a werewolf, I freaked! Fell out of my seat and crawled up the aisle.” The son of Norwegian immigrants, Matheson grew up in Brooklyn and excelled at science and music during high school, at the city’s prestigious Brooklyn Tech. But after seeing combat in World War II and then graduating from the University of Missouri, he charted an entirely different course as a writer. He began with short stories in various genres—sci-fi, mystery, western—and then moved on to novels. To pay the bills, he worked days at the post office and later at an aircraft plant. At the time of his marriage, he had made only five hundred dollars from writing. “Those were very bad years,” he later recalled, during which time his financial anxieties began to play into his fiction: “My theme in those years was of a man, isolated and alone, and assaulted on all sides by everything you could imagine.”

In 1953, Matheson turned this trope into what is probably the most influential horror novel of the twentieth century.
I Am Legend
tracks the lonely existence of Robert Neville, who apparently stands as the only human survivor of a terrible virus that has killed off most of the people and turned the remainder into vampires. But these vampires are far from the becloaked aristocrats who haunted the dreams of the nineteenth century. They are insensate monsters who sleep all day in their lightless hovels and then roam at night in search of fresh blood. Immune to the virus, Neville becomes desperate in his loneliness, brought to the brink of self-destruction by the psychological
ravages of his ceaseless routine: his home must be constantly fortified, and supplies replenished, in order to withstand the nightly onslaught. During the daylight hours he also drives around his city, a postapocalyptic Los Angeles, breezing down its abandoned avenues to stake as many vampires as he can find.

The slightest slip in this routine can lead to terrible consequences. One day, while making his rounds, Neville realizes that his watch has stopped; dusk is near, and he is at least an hour from home. At the intersection of Western and Compton he begins to see the vampires, rushing out of buildings as his station wagon passes. By the time he reaches his house, a mob of them await in front. He careers straight into the crowd, watching them fall like bowling pins, their pale, contorted faces crying out in agony. He heads past his house, and the remaining vampires make chase behind him, allowing him to dart around the block, park in front of his house, and dash to his door before they catch up.

We never learn the precise nature of the virus, though we do know that it afflicts dogs as well as people. Indeed, Matheson’s description of a dog, dying in its agonies, gives us a sense that it bears an acute resemblance to rabies. Neville is amazed to see a live dog walking around, and so he begins to feed it. Soon, though, the dog succumbs: its expression begins to glaze, its tongue lolls out. Neville reaches for it, and its lips pull back in a threatening grimace. It begins to violently shake, with “guttural snarls bubbling in its throat.” The dog dies a week later.

With
I Am Legend
’s evocation of a pandemic, and its intimations of nuclear devastation—World War III, we discover, has recently transpired, possibly helping to create the virus—the novel somehow managed to take the moribund vampire genre, still ruled even then by dour gothic Slavs in musty castles, and to reinvent it for the cold war era. One of Matheson’s prime innovations was its setting: contemporary, suburban. But even more revolutionary was the nature of his “vampires.” Far from the sophisticated loners of vampire literature to date,
this was a mob of undead creatures whose threat lay not in their cunning but in their animal ferocity and, most important, their sheer numbers. “He was going out and staking vampires every day, finding them at the cold counter at Stop and Shop, laid out like lamb chops or something,” Stephen King once said, in citing Matheson’s book as a tremendous influence on his own work. “I realized then that horror didn’t have to happen in a haunted castle; it could happen in the suburbs, on your street, maybe right next door.”

Although
I Am Legend
calls its ghouls “vampires,” the book actually was instrumental in jump-starting an entirely different genre: the zombie tale. The term “zombie” derives from Haitian religious belief and has been appropriated by American fiction authors since at least the late 1920s; Hollywood began making zombie movies in the 1930s. But in the mid-1960s, Matheson’s story inspired George Romero, then a TV-ad director in Pittsburgh, to conceive of a more vital sort of zombie. In a short story that he eventually called “Anubis” (though never published), Romero “basically ripped off” Matheson’s vision in describing a dystopian world where the dead have come back to life. Eventually, chafed by the constraints of television and unable to get funding for a feature, Romero and his friends decided to fund themselves in bringing his story to life. They pooled six hundred dollars apiece, from ten of them; a few of the other producers took roles in the film, the rest all pitched in as miscellaneous crew, and Romero directed. The result was a low-budget masterpiece called
Night of the Living Dead,
which grossed millions as a cult classic and also set the template for all zombie movies that would follow. Like the “vampires” in Matheson’s story, Romero’s zombie undead were not individual malefactors, not some garden-variety Draculas or wolf-men. They were an insatiable horde, eating their way through a society where all order has broken down. Zombies became synonymous with apocalypse.

The zombie-apocalypse genre has seen a particular resurgence in the twenty-first century. A 2004 remake of Romero’s second zombie film,
Dawn of the Dead,
became a top grosser in both senses. Romero
himself came off the bench to make the fourth film in his series, called
Land of the Dead
. A brilliant British spoof film,
Shaun of the Dead,
revolves around two London buddies whose instinct amid a zombie onslaught is to fight their way to their favorite pub. In books, Max Brooks’s tongue-in-decaying-cheek primer,
The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead,
became a bestseller in 2003, and Brooks penned an even more successful follow-up novel called
World War Z;
meanwhile,
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,
a version of the Jane Austen novel with flesh-eating “unmentionables” woven in at opportune moments throughout, shot up bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. One graphic novel series, called
The Walking Dead,
has been turned into a popular TV show.

The
New York Times
has called zombies—in its Sunday Styles section, of all places—“the post-millennial ghoul of the moment.” The question is, why? One theory is that the September 11 attacks took a peculiar psychic toll, leaving Anglophones with apocalypse on the brain. The sci-fi blog
io9.com
made a chart that purported to show zombies gained popularity during periods of social unrest. But its historical choices seemed fatally selective; for example, a long zombie dearth between 1943 and 1959 seems hard to square with this theory, given that Hiroshima and the rise of the cold war were two giant causes for apocalyptic musing if ever there were any. Another notion, which made the rounds during the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States, was that zombie booms correlated with Republican rule. Romero, after all, had reinvented the genre in the early days of Nixon, and then the Reagan administration ushered in a new wave that included
Re-animator
and
The Evil Dead
. In Democratic-leaning times, when (so the theory ran) popular rhetoric tends to demonize bloodsucking plutocrats, the Byronic vampire will find himself ascendant; in conservative periods, by contrast, the fear is heaped on mobs of shadowy masses—whether they be criminals or welfare recipients or Muslims—and so zombies naturally rise again to become the undead bugbear of choice. This theory, too, fails to convince: although
Obama’s tenure has seen the rise of
Twilight
, the squishy tween vampire sensation, zombies have shown no signs of returning to their graves.

Before we can really parse the zombie wherefores, we need to recognize that there has not been just one zombie boom; there have been two concurrent ones, representing two very different visions of what a zombie can be. The first, and probably the most authentic to the Haitian origins of the term, is the slow zombie: the plodding, brainless variety, easily fought off one-on-one with a shovel to the head, or even a nice firm push to the torso. What makes the slow zombies dangerous is their sheer numbers and the relentlessness of their assault, day after day.
*
Slow zombies tend to also be more explicitly
undead,
in some cases even rising from graves, as in Romero’s first film. Really, one should think of slow zombies as the true descendants of Arnod Paole, the ur-vampire observed by Johannes Flückinger in
Visum et repertum:
a creature devoid of cunning or fury, just a dead body walking the earth in a state of semi-decay.