A zombie is a creature that appears in books and popular culture typically as a reanimated dead or a mindless human being. Stories of zombies originated in the Afro-Caribbean spiritual belief system of Vodou, which told of the people being controlled as laborers by a powerful wizard. Zombies became a popular device in modern horror fiction, largely because of the success of George A. Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead .
Voodoo magic
See also: History of HaitiAccording to the tenets of Voodoo, a dead person can be revived by a bokor, or sorcerer. Zombies remain under the control of the bokor since they have no will of their own. "Zombi" is also another name of the Vodou snake lwa Damballah Wedo, of Niger-Congo origin; it is akin to the Kikongo word nzambi , which means "god". There also exists within the vodun tradition the zombi astral which is a part of the human soul that is captured by a bokor and used to enhance the bokor's power. The zombi astral is typically kept inside a bottle which the bokor can sell to clients for luck, healing or business success. It is believed that after a time God will take the soul back and so the zombi is a temporary spiritual entity.
In 1937, while researching folklore in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston encountered the case of a woman who appeared in a village, and a family claimed she was Felicia Felix-Mentor, a relative who had died and been buried in 1907 at the age of 29. Hurston pursued rumors that the affected persons were given powerful drugs, but she was unable to locate individuals willing to offer much information. She wrote:
Several decades later, Wade Davis, a Harvard ethnobotanist, presented a pharmacological case for zombies in two books, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988). Davis traveled to Haiti in 1982 and, as a result of his investigations, claimed that a living person can be turned into a zombie by two special powders being entered into the blood stream (usually via a wound). The first, coup de poudre (French: 'powder strike'), includes tetrodotoxin (TTX), the poison found in the pufferfish. The second powder is composed of dissociatives such as datura. Together, these powders were said to induce a death-like state in which the victim's will would be entirely subject to that of the bokor. Davis also popularized the story of Clairvius Narcisse, who was claimed to have succumbed to this practice.
Davis's claim has been criticized for a number of scientific inaccuracies. One of these is the unlikely suggestion that Haitian witch doctors can keep “zombies” in a state of pharmacologically induced trance for many years. Symptoms of TTX poisoning range from numbness and nausea to paralysis, unconsciousness, and death, but do not include a stiffened gait or a deathlike trance. According to neurologist Terence Hines, the scientific community dismisses tetrodotoxin as the cause of this state, and Davis's assessment of the nature of the reports of Haitian zombies is overly credulous.
Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing further highlighted the link between social and cultural expectations and compulsion, in the context of schizophrenia and other mental illness, suggesting that schizogenesis may account for some of the psychological aspects of zombification.
Popular culture
Main article: Zombies in popular cultureOrigin
The flesh-hungry undead, often in the form of ghouls and vampires, have been a fixture of world mythology. One Thousand and One Nights is an early piece of literature to reference ghouls. A prime example is the story "The History of Gherib and His Brother Agib" (from Nights vol. 6), in which Gherib, an outcast prince, fights off a family of ravenous ghouls, enslaves them, and converts them to Islam.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, while not a zombie novel proper, prefigures many 20th century ideas about zombies in that the resurrection of the dead is portrayed as a scientific process rather than a mystical one, and that the resurrected dead are degraded and more violent than their living selves. Frankenstein , published in 1818, has its roots in European folklore, whose tales of vengeful dead also informed the evolution of the modern conception of vampires as well as zombies. Later notable 19th century stories about the avenging undead included Ambrose Bierce's "The Death of Halpin Frayser", and various Gothic Romanticism tales by Edgar Allan Poe. Though their works couldn't be properly considered zombie fiction, the supernatural tales of Bierce and Poe would prove influential on later writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, by Lovecraft's own admission.
One book to expose more recent western culture to the concept of the zombie was The Magic Island by W.B. Seabrook in 1929. Island is the sensationalized account of a narrator in Haiti who encounters voodoo cults and their resurrected thralls. TIME magazine claimed that the book "introduced 'zombi' into U.S. speech".
In the 1920s and early 1930s, the American horror author H. P. Lovecraft wrote several novelettes that explored the undead theme from different angles. "Cool Air," "In the Vault," "The Thing on the Doorstep," "The Outsider," and "Pickman's Model" are all undead related, but the most definitive undead story in Lovecraft's oeuvre was 1921's Herbert West--Reanimator , which "helped define zombies in popular culture". This Frankenstein -inspired series featured Herbert West, a mad scientist who attempts to revive human corpses with mixed results. Notably, the resurrected dead are uncontrollable, mostly mute, primitive and extremely violent; though they are not referred to as zombies, their portrayal was prescient, anticipating the modern conception of zombies by several decades.
In 1932, Victor Halperin directed White Zombie , a horror film starring Bela Lugosi. This film, capitalizing on the same voodoo zombie themes as Seabrook's book of three years prior, is often regarded as the first legitimate zombie film ever made. Here zombies are depicted as mindless, unthinking henchmen under the spell of an evil magician. Zombies, often still using this voodoo-inspired rationale, were initially uncommon in cinema, but their appearances continued sporadically through the 1930s to the 1960s, with famous titles such as I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959).
The 1936 film Things to Come , based on the novel by H.G. Wells, anticipates later zombie films with an apocalyptic scenario surrounding "the wandering sickness", a highly contagious viral plague that causes the infected to wander slowly and insensibly, very much like zombies, infecting others on contact. Though this film's direct influence on later films isn't known, Things to Come is still compared favorably by some critics to modern zombies.
Richard Matheson's 1954 post-apocalyptic novel I Am Legend is also considered a pioneer of the modern zombie, despite the creatures being described by the main character as vampires. Nevertheless, the film deals with isolation and a worldwide outbreak of a disease causing the population to turn into weak, infected creatures that feed on the blood of the living. Matherson's novel was adapted into the film The Last Man On Earth in 1964, starring Vincent Price. The book would be adapted twice more The Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007).
Hammer Horror's Plague of the Zombies (1966) is another turning stone in the cinematic zombie, being the first film to show zombies as walking corpses. The film set the standard for zombie make-up to come and green rotting flesh as a standard. However, zombies would not be depicted as being free from their masters until 1967.
Modern zombie movies
In 1968 director George Romero released the independent black-and-white zombie film Night of the Living Dead . The story, which was cited as groundbreaking, was the first modern zombie film. Although not the first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead was the predecessor of many films with the same plot.
The movie ushered in the splatter film sub-genre. As many film historians have pointed out, horror prior to Romero's film had mostly involved rubber masks and costumes, cardboard sets, or mysterious figures lurking in the shadows. They were set in locations far removed from urban and suburban America. While the word zombie is never used, but Romero's film introduced the theme of zombies as reanimated, flesh-eating cannibals.
The film and its successors spawned countless imitators that borrowed elements instituted by Romero: Tombs of the Blind Dead , Zombie , Hell of the Living Dead , The Evil Dead , Night of the Comet , Return of the Living Dead , Night of the Creeps , Braindead , Children of the Living Dead , and the video game series Resident Evil (later adapted as films in 2002, 2004, and 2007), Dead Rising , and House of the Dead . Night of the Living Dead is parodied
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