Author Interview! Ross Payton on Zombies of the World

Ross Payton- director of the horror comedy Motor Home from Hell, podcaster of Roleplaying Public Radio, and author of Curriculum of Conspiracy and Road Trip- very graciously let me interview him about his latest book, Zombies of the World (which he very graciously also sent me a review copy of, and believe me, it was AMAZING).

This was my first author interview ever, and I was incredibly nervous. Half the time I felt tongue-tied, and the other half I felt like I was stammering inarticulate wrong things, but Ross Payton was incredibly kind, very intelligent, well-informed, and utterly fascinating to talk to. It was an incredible experience, and I'm very grateful to Mr. Payton for the opportunity.

I wrote up a more polished version of this interview in article format on Examiner, and I'm actually really pleased with how it turned out. Please go read the Examiner article first, as it's really the one I actually intended for public consumption; the version here is just meant as sort of a behind-the-scenes look.

This, however, is the full text of the interview, uncut, directly from my hastily-typed notes. It's mostly a word-for-word transcript of Mr. Payton's answers to my questions, but there were points where my typing was unable to keep up with him, so I've [paraphrased the bits I didn't transcribe exactly, using brackets and italics].

Did you read the proper interview write-up on Examiner yet? If not, go no further! Seriously, read it first! Read it? Okay, now you may proceed.

[You can pick up a copy of Zombies of the World, check out the Zombies of the World blog and web series, or find links to Mr. Payton's other work on zombiesoftheworld.com. You can also get a copy on Amazon. I highly recommend Zombies of the World if you like zombies, or culture, or books, or movie references, or awesome things.]

Q: What real books did you draw on for your research?

A:

Obviously, films were a large part of it, but there were several real books. There is a book called The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, which is by Peter Dendell. Actually, one of the books that was an inspiration was called Dancing at Armageddon, and that’s a book, actually, about survivalists. I wrote a paper for a pop culture conference comparing the zombie genre to survivalists. There’s also the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. I’ve got a book of Aztec; I had to go online to get the Aztec god of death for the Aztec Mummy’s Scientific name. Bullfinch’s Mythology for the Daugr; that actually was the term for an undead Viking warrior that the heroes would have to kill or wrestle or fight in a duel to continue on their quest. I read several articles about the Chinese Hopping Corpse and their role in kung fu films in… I think it was Rue Morgue magazine. There are several books that I’ve read on zombies and pop culture and academia, and I can’t remember when I read them; it’s sort of an ongoing topic for me. Comics like The Walking Dead, Japanese horror films. [There’s a book called] Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn [which was the source for the Preta and the Nukekubi (astute blog-readers will note that I wrote a bit about Kwaidan last year)]. I tried to touch all the bases. One of the first things I did was write a list of every potential monster I could call a species of zombie. Anything that was undead but not vampiric, I kind of used or thought about using.

Q: How did you come up with your theoretical model?

A:

If zombies were real, how would they be in the real world? So, I started examining each of the common tropes you see in zombies. They would evolve over time. You wouldn’t go from zero zombies to billions of zombies overnight, which is kind of the norm [in zombie movies literature]. Zombies don’t spontaneously form, they have to have some sort of host, some sort of body to take over.

There’s actually a precedent in nature, too. There are parasites that mind-control, for lack of a better term, their hosts. There’s one called the sacculina [which is a really creepy parasitic that takes over and castrates crabs]. It’s pretty horrific. There’s also a type of fungus called cordyceps that infects insects, particularly ants, and what they’ll do is they’ll mind control the ant to alter its behavior to go to the highest branch possible so that it’s highly visible, so it can be eaten by something else, and that helps the fungus spread. There are other parasitic organisms like that that kind of alter [other organisms’] behavior and make them zombielike, for lack of a better word, and it’s pretty horrific. The zombie microbe, or whatever it is, is harmless until it has something to control.

[A lot of stories] treat zombies as being outside of history. They show up en masse and nobody knows how to deal with them. If zombies were real, people would have incorporated them into their worldview, because that’s what they do, even with relatively extraordinary things.

Q: What was your inspiration for the Dancing Zombie?

A:

Well, the Dancing Zombie is obviously originally from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” People don’t think about it, but it obviously touched on popular culture ever since it was released; you know, the most popular music video of all time.

If they’re different species, there are different motivations. [Zombies are] all psychologically motivated, even if it’s to eat someone. [Zombies have no biological need to eat, and they can’t digest it; the desire for human flesh is a psychological drive.] [There’s] the revenant, which is psychologically motivated by the desire to murder, to get revenge. Why would their motivations all be murderous? Why wouldn’t there be essentially a harmless species with a desire so deeply ingrained into it that it wants to dance, to entertain us, to create art.

I actually had to find, looking through Latin dictionaries to find an appropriate word, and there are actually people who come up with modern Latin words for modern concepts. [It took a lot of time searching through the dictionary, but he found a Latin word for choreography.]

Q: What’s the story behind the Temporally Displaced Robots?

A:

It’s an incredibly oblique reference to a specific horror movie that I saw as a kid. It’s called The Robot Versus the Aztec Mummy. It’s a Mexican horror film made in 1957. It’s just such a weird concept that it stuck in my mind. It’s just such an unusual premise that I had to stick it in there both as a joke and just as a reference to that movie, which is really bizarre because it’s about a mad scientist who wants to steal the gold guarded by this Aztec mummy, so he builds a robot to get past this mummy. [He didn’t seem to realize that if you build this robot that can destroy things, you can just sell it for a lot more than the gold is worth.] Things turn out poorly for him, of course. [There’s a web video series for Zombies of the World, and Payton had originally used a clip from the movie in of the videos, thinking it was public domain; it turned out not to be public domain, so Payton had to re-create the scene for his video.]

Q: You say in your book that an all-out “zombie apocalypse” is unlikely; can you describe your idea of a more realistic zombie worst-case scenario?

A:

I do list that there are a few species that are so dangerous that you have to shoot them on sight. The English foaming zombie, i.e. the 28 Days Later zombie, and the Talking Zombie, which is very intelligent, and an intelligent zombie, if you think about it, is very scary: nearly unkillable, addicted to human flesh, with no morals.

The zombie apocalypse would probably happen due to overreaction on our part, using nuclear weapons on a zombie-infested city, which would cause a cascading effect on the environment. You’d kill a few of the zombies, but you also destroy a whole city’s worth of infrastructure and resources, and you have a bunch of radioactive zombies now. When panic or bad decision-making happen, what can save you from that?

Q: Are you planning any sequels or related books?

A:

I had an idea of maybe doing a spinoff book at some point called The Secret History of Robots where robots had showed up at various points in history, not doing anything, just being jerks. But that’s a long ways off.

I’m actually working on a novel right now called Dead Power, and it’s set in the Zombies of the World universe. In the last chapter [of Zombies of the World, there’s a power generation plant] that’s run with zombies on stationary bicycles to generate electricity. My idea of Dead Power is that there’s a scientific research facility, and they have all these zombies that they’re studying. One group of the zombies gets loose, obviously. The government is going to bomb the island unless the human staff and some of the intelligent zombies work together. The Talking Zombies are very untrustworthy because they’re addicted to human flesh, and they want to eat your brains, but they’re smart enough to realize that if they eat the humans, they’ll be bombed, and they won’t survive. They work together, and they survive the airstrike. Writing a novel is a totally different beast; writing one narrative as opposed to a bunch of shorter standalone chapters is a very different process. I’m halfway done right now, and hopefully I’ll be done with the rough draft by the end of the year. [The book should be available in Spring 2012].

Q: If some zombie species possess human or near-human intelligence, how is it ethical to hook them up to power generators?

A:

That’s a very good question. The way I have it in [Zombies of the World] is that zombies, even if they’re intelligent, are a separate species, and basically they’re not given full human rights because of that. They’re treated as animals, because obviously there’s widespread distrust. Even the zombie rights activists are focusing on not shooting all the zombies. The zombie rights movement has been very limited. Basically it’s not a very enlightened world. I kind of wrote it from the standpoint of a scientist who is very pro-zombie, but it’s not a very enlightened world.

Q: Why do you think zombies are seeing such resurgence in popular culture right now?

A:

That’s a great question. It’s sort of a complex thing. If you look at zombies from 1954 on- because 1954 is I Am Legend- you have over a decade between that and Night of the Living Dead, and then you have Dawn of the Dead in 1978, and from 1978 to 2001 they’re kind of relegated to low-budget B movies. Horror fans were aware of them and liked them [but not most other people]. It started changing in 2002 with 28 Days Later, a very bold take on it using digital technology and using digital video to shoot it. It’s very well-received, to put it lightly. It kind of starts boiling over and people kind of start thinking about it. Then, of course, you have 2003, the Max Brooks survival guide, and everyone’s thinking about it.

What I found in the survivalist research [was that survivalists have the idea that with] the right consumer goods, the right firearms, the right dry rations, and if they learned the right skills, they could survive a nuclear war with the communists. That was very popular in the 1980s and kind of died down with the fall of the Soviet Union and kind of bubbled up again in the Clinton Era [with Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Oklahoma City bombing]. The finale of it is the Y2K thing; they freak out about that and then realize that wasn’t going to happen, and everyone [leaves the movement] basically aside from the extreme diehards. A lot of people still have these insecurities about living in this world, but there’s no convenient Soviet Union to be afraid of. [The world is full of] vague amorphous fears [like terrorism and SARS] and nebulous threats. Zombies are a cozy catastrophe; it wipes out the world, but there’s no inconvenience to it. The mall is still there. You aren’t crazy if you’re a zombie apocalypse fan, because everyone knows it’s a joke. It’s a way of indulging or massaging those insecurities without being a conspiracy theorist. People think it’s relevant because people don’t necessarily think zombies are going to show up anytime soon, but yeah, society is unstable.

Unlike vampire stories, they’re about normal people dealing with normal problems in extraordinary situations. They’re not about special or chosen people. They’re about everyday blue collar or middle class people trying to survive.

The zombie is a great monster for a lot of different reasons. It shows what we are when the rules of society and civilization break down, and they show us what we’ll be sooner or later- we’ll be dead.

The zombie genre is very versatile, unlike vampire stories. Vampire stories have a very specific, limited vocabulary; they’re about seduction and corruption. [Vampires look very attractive on the outside to seduce us, but they’re still dead things that want to eat us. A vampire is] the serial killer who looks nice on the outside, but the vampire is powerless to change society. [Vampires have to hide or they’ll be hunted down.] Even if there is more than one vampire, they never threaten society. Zombies, on the other hand, whenever they show up in the story, it’s just over. Society is done. We’re all afraid zombies are going to be everywhere. Zombies are scarier than vampires, because you can stake that vampire or you can move somewhere where there’s a lot of sunlight. That’s sort of the intriguing thing about zombies; they’re always there. It doesn’t matter if they win or lose individual battles. They’re always there to threaten us.

Q: Other than your own, what is your current favorite zombie book?

A:

Movie, I could tell you easily, would be Night of the Living Dead. I saw that as a kid; this was the first movie I saw period as a kid that had such a dark ending. Every human character dies in it. It’s so primitive; it’s like you’re watching surveillance footage somebody smuggled out, a home movie, not a real movie. I didn’t realize movies could be like that.

Zombie books, of course, there’s I Am Legend and of course there’s World War Z. I did read a steampunk zombie novel, Boneshaker, by Sheri Priest; it’s very good, and I enjoyed that quite a bit.

[Thanks again, Mr. Payton!]