Viral histories of the undead

In 1953, Richard Matheson, inspired in part by the movie Werewolf of London, wrote the iconic novel I Am Legend (yes, the one that became the Will Smith movie). It was a novel nominally about vampires, but not the rural cape-wearing paramours popular up until then. Matheson pitted a lone protagonist researching and testing a cure for a global pandemic that created a horde of base, animalistic vampires. Sound familiar? Matheson’s vampires are the embryonic version of the modern day zombie. Zombie master George Romero even admits he “basically ripped off” Matheson in writing one his first short stories about a dystopian world of the undead.

In Rabid, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy actually name check World War Z in a chapter-length overview of the history of zombies and how they connect to rabies through their sister-monster: the vampire. Yes, zombies, part of our culture for less than a century, find their roots in the thousands of years old myths of vampires. There’s not just a casual relationship between the virus and the monster: zombies and their much older cousins, vampires, share a causal connection.

The myth of vampires, imbued with traits of rabies victims, was popularized long before we fully understood rabies

Spanish physician Juan Gomez-Alonso explains four connections between rabies and vampire myths in a 1998 Neurology journal article, the most obvious being infection through the blood via bites. Rabies victims also often suffer from facial spasms, lending them an animalistic appearance. The third connection is the time frame: vampire lore had them living for forty days before being turned, the same amount of time it usually takes for the victim of a rabies attack to die after their initial bite. The final connection is probably the most surprising: sex drive. The insatiable sexual desire that’s a trademark of both traditionally gothic and sparkly modern vampires can also be traced to rabies. Male rabies victims often get involuntary erections and have spontaneous orgasms. Unsurprisingly, this was not often spoken of outright, but was alluded to in much of the early medical literature, with one eighteenth century Austrian physician noting “his seed and his life were lost at the same time.”

The myth of vampires, imbued with traits of rabies victims, was popularized long before we fully understood rabies. Even further back than the vampire is a tale that is part myth, part metaphor: in Homer’s epics, the Trojan hero and Achilles’ foe Hector has a strong fury akin to primal possession that made him terrifying and superhuman on the battlefield. The word used to describe his state is lyssa. As Wasik and Murphy describe it in Rabid: “Lyssa was rare, terrifying, violent, and animalistically destructive of self. It made creatures maim and kill those closest to them. It hollowed out reason and left nothing but frenzy.” In Attic Greek (the prestige dialect of Ancient Greek that was spoken in Attica) lyssa literally translates to rabies. World War Z has its own version of the lyssa crazed warriors: quislings. Quislings were once humans, reduced below a feral state into thinking and acting as zombies. It’s an involuntary coping mechanism on the part of some weak-willed percentage of the population. They were so ingrained with the idea they were zombies, they’d lay motionless while they were eaten alive.

We personify and mythologize what we fear to try to understand it in whatever way we can.