Great piece, Tom! It made me think of The Last of Us (filmed just outside Calgary, where I live so I’m sentimentally attached!). The show’s infected aren’t classic zombies, but their movement patterns track the profiles you outline: “from the slow, stumbling somnambulists of early horror to the hyperkinetic, rage-driven infected of contemporary cinema” with every version in between. The hyperkinetic type, in particular, feels like the parasite’s final form: reasoning, coordinated, predatory: a team of hunters that signals humanity’s end, not necessarily because of the infected, but because humans can’t stop fighting each other. So what does it say about our current collective anxiety that we’re contending with the entire spectrum of zombie manifestations, all at once? ;)
Thanks so much, Myka. Yes, I did watch the first few episodes of this and really enjoyed it. Not least because it appears to have reinvigorated the field of neuropsychomycology, as it were! I didn't really touch on it in the essay, but I think there's a very interesting aspect about all this which focuses more on the vector of transmission rather than the manifestation of pathology. I think the extent to which we are able to defend ourselves against the zombifying agent (whether it's physical contact, radiation, a virus, radio transmissions, language, etc.) also gets to the heart of what's bothering us.
Great piece, Tom! It made me think of The Last of Us (filmed just outside Calgary, where I live so I’m sentimentally attached!). The show’s infected aren’t classic zombies, but their movement patterns track the profiles you outline: “from the slow, stumbling somnambulists of early horror to the hyperkinetic, rage-driven infected of contemporary cinema” with every version in between. The hyperkinetic type, in particular, feels like the parasite’s final form: reasoning, coordinated, predatory: a team of hunters that signals humanity’s end, not necessarily because of the infected, but because humans can’t stop fighting each other. So what does it say about our current collective anxiety that we’re contending with the entire spectrum of zombie manifestations, all at once? ;)
Thanks so much, Myka. Yes, I did watch the first few episodes of this and really enjoyed it. Not least because it appears to have reinvigorated the field of neuropsychomycology, as it were! I didn't really touch on it in the essay, but I think there's a very interesting aspect about all this which focuses more on the vector of transmission rather than the manifestation of pathology. I think the extent to which we are able to defend ourselves against the zombifying agent (whether it's physical contact, radiation, a virus, radio transmissions, language, etc.) also gets to the heart of what's bothering us.