Blood of the Zombie – Let the Blood Flow
This is gonna be one of these long rambling posts. Yay!
A while back I did a kinda gaming related look at Skeletons in fantasy, as in reanimated undead, and how tricky they were to work out (hey, some of that I talked about could be useful in role-playing). Well, this is kinda a follow up.
I was painting up a couple of Zombies, where I was trying to copy a paint scheme (or as best me with my limited skills could do) when I noticed something I felt was very weird, and yet very common.
Basically, you have red veins clearly visible on the skin. Hell, that is VERY common. Sometimes on real muscle bound characters you get red veins to highlight them.. but first off, we are gonna stick with the Zombies, and second, isn’t there something very wrong with that?
Well, the first thing is they aren’t veins. as part of the blood circulation system which probably has a better name, Humans and most creatures really, have 3 types of Blood Vessel. though you could argue 5. We have Arteries, Veins, and Capillaries. The extra two, by the way, are Arteriole and Venule which are where the Arteries and Veins connect to the capillaries respective.
The Arteries are the blood vessels which distribute oxygen-rich blood around the body, making sure your tissue and organs have the oxygen and other nutrients they need. As these are oxygen rich, the main blood cells take on a ‘red’ colour. Blood is pumped around these by the force of your heart which means the blood can only go in one direction.
The Veins are blood vessels which bring the oxygen-poor or deoxygenated blood from the organs and tissues and return them to the heart and lungs to get ‘refueled’. The pressure in these are much weaker (and so the walls of the vessels are thinner) because they don’t need to be pumped around as fast and are in fact, not really pumped by the heart. while the heart beat does do somethin on them, the Veins have valves in order to stop the blood from flowing the wrong way. Part of a way to show how much slower moving they are is that about 75% of all the blood in your body, is in fact in the veins, and not the arteries. The blood inside these veins taken on a dark red (suou) colour. Due to how light works and is absorbed into the skin itself, these take on a purple-blue colour when viewed through skin.
Capillaries are the less important in our case, but not so in the human body as these are the connections which have openings to let the oxygen and nutrients move from the blood stream to the tissues and organs and there are various sub-types of these but like I said, for our purpose it’s not that important.
Why we often appear to say ‘Veins’ when we mean Arteries or Arteries and veins, I don’t know. If you look at your skin, I think a good spot being the inner lower arm by the wrist, you will often be able to clearly see the veins. Not so the arteries. So how come people often paint the arteries being shown and not the veins? No clue.
When skin dies, it takes on a grey-hue, or more, it appears that because the oxygenated blood is reduced, and often becomes nothing so it loses the red-ness that comes from that. Skin itself is semi-translucent with Melanin adding a pigment of how light or dark it is. Even some of the darkest pigmented skin is a variation of grey-ish with amount of red. It gets a bit complex really and we aren’t looking at skin really.
So. we have the first problem that Zombies become grey due to the lack of oxygenated blood so the skin is dead, but then there is even LESS reason you would see the red Arteries through the skin compared to the blue (appearing) Veins. But what else do we have?
well. Zombies are dead right? well, technically undead but they cells aren’t growing and the lack of oxygen turns the skin grey. Do you know how long it takes for the blood to lose most of the oxygen from the blood? minutes. The skin becomes noticeable pale (known as Pallor Mortis) between 15 to 20 minutes after the heart has stopped beating. That isn’t just because the blood isn’t pumping any more, it’s a mixture of the blood not pumping and no new oxygen entering the system. Because of the lack of pumping, you will get blood pooling in the lower extremities of the body. someone that is laying face up on their back, you will find the blood pooling on their back. Often you will get a bit of a redness there because of this until the oxygen has gone. of course, even when the oxygen has gone, you still see get the blood pooling.
It’s something that has always confused me with some ‘splatter’ films.. someone has been dead for a couple of hours, they are laying there, someone cuts open the body and blood shoots out. huh? depending on where you cut and how they have been laying, there wouldn’t be too much bleeding at all, though you will get some. It takes about 3 to 5 days for the body to start to bloat and a bloody foam leaking from the mouth and nose, and 8 to 10 days (I believe) for the blood to decompose and you get alot of gas build up (yeah, what happens to a human (or any) corpse is… not very pleasant. Even Tom Savini tones it down and he got alot of his ‘experince’ as a combat photographer during the Vietnam War where he saw alot of the stuff first hand (Also, you really should check up on what he is nicknamed ‘Duck Slayer’).
Well.. we have gone over the blood thing but it brings up another issue which is the second problem and that has less to do with the painting side. And that is how do Zombies work?
Well.. okay, we have to classify terms here. Cause that is a HUGE elephant. When we talk about Zombies, we aren’t talking about Zombies at all.
A Zombie is one of two things, We can ignore the ‘snake god’ side for now as it’s not important and stick with the ‘a corpse which is reanimated like a puppet by a priest’ which is from Voodoo and it’s original forms. That’s not at all like what we see most of the time.
I’m sure most peoples go to idea for Zombies is George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead”.. a film which had.. erm.. two alternative sequel lines (the ‘Living Dead’ series and the ‘Dead’ series.. it’s very complex and to do with the fact that it wasn’t Romero on his own in the first place). But these films don’t feature Zombies at all. In fact, they don’t even MENTION Zombies. The main term given to them is Ghouls. These ghouls are reanimated corpses which appear to go after human flesh as a source of food. Well.. that doesn’t appear to gel with what a Zombie is then does it? well.. it gets worse.
Night of the Living Dead’s ghouls were based on the great novel ‘I Am Legend’ by acclaimed writer Richard Matheson. I doubt anyone can say enough about how important a writer Richard Matheson was. I Am Legend invented ALOT which has become huge tropes and even a new genre. What’s the blood about? well, it’s about the daily life of Robert Neville. Some time before, a pandemic broke out and killed most of the human population. However, these came back as a form of ‘Vampire’. They were mostly nocturnal, they wanted to eat the blood (and body) of the living, they were pale skinned due to there lack of being alive. Neville believes he may in fact be the last living human alive and one things he does to survive is during the day, when they are inactive and in their ‘lairs’, he goes around and hunts these vampires and kills them with a stake to the heart. When he finds a dog, and a girl who appear to be alive. He has been trying to find a cure to the plague and how he might be immune now due to his experiments and being bitten by an infect vampire bat. well.. turns out, (spoiler) she isn’t alive. Some humans were kinda immune to the plague and while others became mostly brain dead beings much like modern day Zombies, others in fact were more harmless. They are infected, sure, and have some of the same weaknesses, but they aren’t pathologically violent murderers and want to start to reform a new society. Problem is, he has been going around killing them. And despite some beliefs, the two can’t be at peace. As Vampires were in old human myth, he is now the legendary monster. Thus the title, as he is now a Legend.
While the novel itself was inspired by Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man” about a immune man surviving in a ravaged plague-infested world, it adds alot to it and even adds the idea of a scientific origin for vampires. It was this form of Vampire that Romero turned into his Ghouls (taking the ‘violent dumb’ type, not the smarter type.. oh, the amount of stuff in the 80s and early 90s they though they were smart by introducing different ‘types’ of zombie.. and Matheson did it in the 50s) which were later then renamed ‘Zombies’.
So we are looking at this type, a blood sucking brainless dead reanimated corpse. well.. we have a problem then. the skin is pale. no-oxygen in the blood. They are also often very skinny.. cause the muscle is dying and has no oxygen. So.. how is this thing moving? It’s also dumb because lack of oxygen to the brain. with such brain damage, even without ‘magic’, I can see how some basic motor functions would still work, we just have to look at Terri Schiavo… a Woman that basically died in 1990 but was kept ‘alive’ until finally allowing her body to dig in 2005. It involved ALOT of court battles. Anyway.. even after death, the brain can keep a certain amount of it’s functions going.
Though really, we need to have ‘Magic’ to explain how they can move, and have any real form of strength. if you remove this and go for a more science view, we are screwed. No oxygen, muscles rot. Brain rot, body can’t move can do anything. We can go with what is often done for Vampires in that they ‘suck blood’ as a food source cause without it, they can’t move or do anything. They need blood, both oxygen in the blood and to create new blood cells to replace the old ones. Some things have vampires CAN survive without it but are basically stuck in a ‘I can’t do anything’ mood due to not having any blood or anything. Some go to extremes in that you can add blood to the ashes of a vampire to bring them back.. a bit iffy but fair enough ^_^
It does always bug me when I see something do super fast and super strong Zombies of this type cause.. they have to eat SOO much to get that energy and.. you might as well just go back to calling them a Vampire or a Ghoul cause it clearly isn’t a Zombie. Even comic books which on the whole shouldn’t be too realistic when dealing with superheroes cause.. there is SOO much you can do wrong if you try to be too real, can successfully suspend belief by having a speedster needing to eat alot to make up the energy they use up by moving fast etc. So you don’t get the rubbish of a super fast, super strong zombie. And them zombies are often done in stuff which is meant to be more ‘adult’ and realistic.. sigh.
Anyway… lets not take into account that the human body after a year or so is.. in such a state that… well.. I think the smell might be a bigger threat. We kinda need a degree of magic, like with the Skeletons, to explain how the are more kept in a fixed state of half-death. When we move to the Zombie types which eat, it gets more confusing. Maybe they eat for enjoyment then food? but then, they would mean a much higher level of intelligence then normally believed and we go back to the whole I am Legend thing with him murdering the semi-immune people. We do have some Zombie types which aren’t really dead. They kinda should have died but the infection gets to them before they really are dead. In the Resident Evil (BioHazard) games.. or atleast up to the 3rd (I found 4 was awful and the series has had soo many remakes and recons since that just make it into a very bad superhero series) what were said to be zombie like enemies weren’t really dead. I don’t remember any who DID die and then came back. The best example is probably Officer Marvin.. I forget his surname, who was dying, but as he was near death, the infection of the virus took hold and he mutated the final step. This is even visually shown so you can see it’s near death. when his body no-longer has any strength to fight off the infection. The fact that the ‘zombies’ can enter a hibernation phase can blur the lines a bit but it’s still pretty clear. Then they decide to screw the whole thing with how the virus work and everything that has been shown in the games and say they had viruses SOO much in advance of what was seen even BEFORE those ones were made, making the whole point of them useless (Seriously, sorry to side track too much but the whole Tyrant project, the Hunters, everything becomes stupid the moment ‘Super power Wesker’ appears and says he had a virus which was soo in advance of anything the company had, and he in fact was a super intelligence clone child created long before the Viruses even existed, that there was no reason the company would try soo hard to make the biological weapons which were in fact, soo backwards… sigh.. a series which really knew how to kill itself and turn it into bad fanfiction. mm.. modern comic writers maybe ¬_¬)
Well. Anyway. Very rambling, which isn’t too odd for me but yeah.. Red ‘Veins’ on Zombies… it’s stupid. Why do it? get the colour right and make it more blue. In fact, even from a colour design point of view… I can’t really see how red works in most cases. a nice purple-blue would show as good a contrast with the skin tones as a red, if not better.
