The question that we have got to address
is what the heH is it?
About 5% of the population aren't affected immediately.
It is viral. it has to be viral. There is no plausible alternative.
We did a ton of research,
and what was consistently fascinating to us
were notions that kept coming out of science,
and, in particular, the swarming of birds
or the way that animals pass on parasites,
and it seemed to lend itself over and over again
to a way in which we could talk about the zombies.
We wanted their behavior to resemble
things that we associate with organic elements.
So, whether it's the zombies climbing the wall in Israel
in the manner of a kind of an anthill,
or other swarm-type behavior,
we keep using a grammar about nature and science.
A zombie, in the simplest form, is somebody brought back from the dead.
Zombies really appeared in literature in about 1918, 1919.
Somebody wrote a book Zombies in the Cane Fields, set in Haiti,
where there were many, many rumors
about zombies being used as slaves to work the fields.
And it turns out, there's a lot of truth to it.
They hadn't really died,
but they were drugged in a way that made them seem dead,
and then buried, and then taken out very soon.
And apparently, they had lost a lot of their brain capabilities,
and just worked as slaves in the field relentlessly.
And that is true in the sense that
it was reported by many, many people who lived in Haiti,
having seen this and witnessed it.
There was a memo sent from this installation 11 days ago.
It had the word "zombie" in it.
Do you know anything about it?
Yeah.
It was an email, not a memo.
Pretty obvious nobody back home bothered to read it.
What we fear and what fascinates us
are reflections of our own insecurities and our own doubts
and our own questions about nature and the universe.
With the zombie, it is the manifestation of our fear of death,
and we are both attracted by that and frightened by that,
and therein lay the appeal of zombie movies.
Zombies, as we know them,
began with the George Romero film Night of the Living Dead.
And what... The fear at that time of nuclear annihilation,
or the ramifications of radioactivity,
and what could happen to you and your body.
And today, the different kinds of fears that we have...
They're still based on fear.
The very specific, whether it's germs and bacteria and viruses,
or whether it's radiation from nuclear holocaust,
really, it's a trivial difference.
It's still the fear of death.
I became involved with World War Z through Jeremy Kleiner,
who was very interested in the biological basis for this film.
What I do is I work on zombie ants.
A particular system where parasites infect individual ants, worker ants,
belonging to a colony,
and as they infect them, they take over their behavior
and make the individuals move away from the rest of the hive,
move to some other location,
which is exactly the location where the parasite wants to grow and reproduce,
and they do this in a very orchestrated manner,
and it's one of the most complicated examples
of parasite manipulation of host behavior that we yet know.
But in thinking about the movie and reading the scripts early on
and discussing a lot with Jeremy and the scriptwriter,
we explored the different types of manipulation
that we see in the natural world.
And so, what we wanted to do in discussing this
was think about the biological basis of manipulation.
How behavior can be controlled by one organism, a parasite,
to bring about the central thing that parasites need,
which is transmission.
The ones I saw bitten turned in 12 seconds. Same here?
Five or 10 minutes.
Where do zombies come from? Do we understand the basis of this?
We can think about vampires and werewolves
and we know that they have a biological basis,
the rabies virus, which causes mammals to lose control,
become aggressive, attack other individuals.
We know squarely that
the birthplace of a lot of these myths and legends
about werewolves and vampires comes from that virus.
There's a single-mindedness to these characters,
almost a herd mentality.
One leaves and the rest follow, like lemmings, they go,
but some survive, so the hunt continues.
From a biologist's perspective, it makes an awful lot of sense,