TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to T. Sean Weintz:
> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Ooops, I was thinking of humanoid
> type Zombies. In a movie on television the other night, "Village of
> the Undead", after some damn fool went and dug up a grave at the
> local cemetery, the Zombie thus resurrected went around the town
> creating more of his kind. He would touch and kill one person; that
> person became a Zombie. Then the two Zombies created more of their
> kind the same way, finding new people, killing them, and bringing
> them back to life as new Zombies. After about an hour of this (one
> Zombie creates another Zombie, etc) eventually the few remaining
> actual living people in this village thought it prudent to call in
> the police, or some kind of militia to do in the bunch of them,
> which is how the movie ended. It was sort of like two old movies I
> saw, 'The Zombies of Mora Tau' and 'Abbott and Costello Meet the
> Zombie'. With humanoid zombies, first someone has to dig one up,
> then that one goes around reproducing his own kind from other
> people. I guess computers don't have to do it that way. PAT]
Yeah. Movie zombies do work that way. I'm afraid I don't know any of
those movies. But 'Night of the Living Dead' illustrates the same
concept.
However not all humanoid zombies work that way -- traditional African
and Haitian voodoo folklore zombies (a tradition predating the
existence of movies) are created one at a time by voodoo priest or
"Bokor". These zombies are the supposedly used as slaves by the
bokor. They can't themselves make others into zombies -- in fact they
are completely under the control of the bokor, and do his/her bidding
only.
That is the type of zombie I think whomever coined the phrase for
computer use had in mind.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, in this movie on television, a
professor was giving a lecture on the Voodoo religion, and someone
raised the point of how there in that town, a person who had been
thought to be a Witch or a Zombie or something like that had been
sacrificed and put to death by the town authorities a couple hundred
years earlier. Nothing would do but this professor had to go dig up
the corpse and examine it to look for signs of Witchcraft or
Voodoo-ism or whatever. Well ... unearthing that corpse and its casket
is what got all the trouble started. It turned out to be a Zombie, who
was quite angry at having been made to wait two hundred years to get
dug up so he could get back to his business. Although many townfolk
were victimized (turned into Zombies themselves and left for 'undead'
to continue the rampage as more and more of them got created) in the
course of the movie, of course the Professor and his female research
assistant got away unscathed, as you would expect. PAT]
T. Sean Weintz (strap@hanh-ct.org)