Rudy Eugene, Ronald Poppo
When a naked man chomped on a homeless man’s face in Miami in May, authorities speculated that Rudy Eugene’s cannibalistic behavior was spurred on by bath salts, a designer drug that gives users a sense of invincibility but also an inability to regulate body temperature, which could explain his lack of clothing. While it was a theory eventually proven false by a toxicology report, the mere thought that a man would want to dine on another man’s flesh called up stark images of Hannibal Lecter. And when similarly ghastly incidents in Maryland and New Jersey were reported in the following weeks, the Internet was suddenly abuzz that the “Zombie Apocalypse” was here. The fear about flesh-eaters everywhere became so widely discussed that the Centers for Disease Control was forced to affirm that a zombie apocalypse wasn’t actually descending upon us.