Dawn of the living dead
QUESTION What were the first novel and film to feature a zombie?
Zombies might have appeared in the oldest text in the world, The epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient mesopotamian epic poem dating to 2,000bC.
ishtar, the goddess of war, love and desire, is rejected by Gilgamesh when she tries to seduce him.
in revenge, she threatens to release a swarm of animated corpses on to the world: ‘i will knock down the gates of the netherworld, i will smash the door posts and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up and eat the living!’
There are also threats of a zombie apocalypse in the bible. Zechariah 14:12: ‘And the lord will send a plague on all the nations that fought against Jerusalem. Their people will be like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away.’
isaiah 26:19–20: ‘but your dead will live; their bodies will rise . . . go, my people, enter your rooms and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves until their wrath has passed us by.’
Frankenstein, published in 1818 by mary shelley, prefigures many 20th-century ideas about zombies in that the resurrection of the dead is portrayed as a scientific, rather than a mystical, process, and the resurrected dead are degraded and more violent than their living selves.
All the modern elements were combined in H. P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West — Reanimator (1921). This was a series of short stories featuring a mad scientist who tries to revive human corpses.
Though Lovecraft does not use the word zombie, his creatures bore all the hallmarks of the modern zombie i.e. animalistic and uncontrollable behaviour. Though considered by critics, and himself, as some of his poorest stories, they were to prove highly influential.
it was American occultist William seabrook who popularised the term zombie in The magic island (1929).
Praised by the New York evening Post as ‘the best and most thrilling book of exploration,’ this 1929 volume offers firsthand accounts of Haitian voodoo rituals. seabrook’s book became the basis for the first zombie film, White Zombie (1932), which relates a woman’s transformation into a zombie at the hands of a voodoo master. bela Lugosi stars as the antagonist, ‘murder’ Legendre, with madge bellamy playing his victim.
George A. Romero (1940-2017) reinvented the genre in Night of The Living Dead (1968) by relocating the action to contemporary America and transforming the zombies into flesh-eating ghouls.
Romero was inspired by Richard matheson’s vampire novel i Am Legend. Romero’s ruthless nihilism, as he confounded audience expectations by mercilessly killing off all his good characters, was all his own.
Jared Bourke, Chesterfield, Derbys.
QUESTION Are polar bear numbers becoming dangerously high?
oNe of the enduring images of Al Gore’s famous climate change film, An inconvenient Truth, was a cartoon of a polar bear struggling to climb onto a piece of sea ice. Al Gore then explained how polar bears are disappearing because the Arctic is melting.
However, the inconvenient truth for Gore is that new population estimates from the 2016 scientific Working Group demonstrate polar bears are thriving.
The current population of 22,633 to 32,257 compares with 2005’s figures of 20,000 to 25,000 bears.
This is a major increase from estimates that only 8,000 to 10,000 bears remained in the late sixties. scientists have realised that polar bears are more resilient to changing levels of sea ice than environmentalists believed.
in 2008, stories of a polar bear crisis inspired California firefighter Zac Unger to move to Canada to chart their decline and raise awareness of their plight.
but he found that polar bears were thriving. in his 2013 book Never Look A Polar bear in The eye, he wrote: ‘it was going to be a mournful elegy to the dying polar bears . . . i ended up writing a nuanced book about big egos, shaky science and weird characters.’
Zoologist susan Crockford, of the University of Victoria, british Columbia, claims that certain areas have reached their full capacity.
in a report for the climate sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation, she said: ‘scientists are finding that polar bears are well distributed throughout their range and adapting well to changes in sea ice.’
it would be extreme to say bears have reached a dangerously high level, and many still believe they are endangered. According to the WWF UK Polar Programme: ‘Polar bears are at a crossroads, and climate change and loss of Arctic summer sea ice is the biggest threat to their future.’
James Lesser, St Andrews, Fife.
QUESTION Is there a World War I rifle in a British museum with a huge bulge in the barrel where a British bullet going out met a German bullet coming in?
mAiDsToNe museum, which has a room dedicated to the Queen’s own Royal West Kent regiment, displays a rifle damaged in this way.
on August 13, 1915, Pte W.J. smith of the 6th battalion was aiming his Lee enfield .303 rifle at a sniper 50 yards away. The German, using a smaller-calibre rifle, fired first and his bullet went along the barrel of smith’s weapon and damaged the bolt. The barrel remained intact.
smith survived, with two black eyes. He was killed on october 28, 1915, and his name is on the Loos memorial.
Geoff Parr, Maidstone, Kent.
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