There has been many a night when I have stayed up way past any sane hour contemplating why zombies have this natural need to eat human flesh, especially the brain. (I have a zombie blog, is it really that strange?)

So lets go hypothetical here, you are newly dead and suddenly find yourself up and about in the real world as a decaying corpse with little or now will or self awareness. You shamble, lets go classic here people, about looking like a cross between a Smurf after a bender and road kill.

You spy with your nasty glazed over eyes a few college students drinking and having sex on a nearby gravestone. Let’s face it, that’s what all college students do in horror films and are usually skewered soon after.

What do you do? Do you hunker behind a gravestone and watch them go at it like a peeping zombie? Maybe get your zombie wank on? (Like, I was the only one that thought of it.)

 Does your fight or flight instinct kick in and you run away terrified? Do you attack the nubile and flexible teens with your slow undead body?

All of these seem like logical possibilities. But why would a zombie look at these people and say “Wow, that blond would look great with a little ranch dressing and some baby carrots.”

You can bring out the argument that zombies are little more than animals living on instinct and procreation and eating are two of the most basic instincts. True, but eating only an instinct if you’re hungry. Very few animals in the wild will kill its prey if it’s not hungry or storing food for winter. Lions in Africa don’t have a fridge to keep their rotting gazelles and their 40’s of Colt 45. There is a balance in nature.

Zombies on the other hand will eat and eat and eat even though they have no functioning intestinal or stomach system. They will eat to the point that their stomachs literally explode, as told in World War Z. I don’t think a zombie is going to pass up on munching down on a person just because he ate an hour before. “No, go ahead I am not going to eat you. I just had a trucker about an hour ago and I am stuffed. Can you come back around 5:30, I am sure I will be hungry again?”

I think the zombie’s drive to feed on human flesh is driven not by the instinctual need to eat, but the need to procreate. Zombies cannot procreate in the normal way, something I am more than a little grateful for. That’s one aspect that’s even too disturbing for me and something that should never be touched with a 10-foot pole.

The more plausible reasoning is that feeding on human flesh is more likely connected to propagating the species. In every zombie movie made, zombies procreate by biting another person. It’s what makes them a threat. It’s similar to the way a virus will use a host. If you have a cold and sneeze in someone’s face, the virus can pass to them.

Zombies, and I hate the idea of a zombie virus because it is so cliché, transmit their virus, infection, magical fairy dust, etc. via their bite like some kind of zombie orgasm. So if it isn’t bad enough that zombies are the red headed stepchildren of the horror world, they are also simply vessels for procreation.

It almost makes you feel bad for them … until they try to eat you then all bets are off.