Zombie Wiki

Zombies are fictional undead creatures regularly encountered in horror and fantasy themed works. They are typically depicted as mindless, reanimated corpses with a hunger for human flesh, and in some cases, human brains in particular. Although they share their name and some superficial similarities with the zombie from Haitian Vodun, their links to such folklore are unclear and many consider George A. Romero's seminal film The Night of the Living Dead to be the progenitor of these creatures. By 2011 the influence of zombies in popular consciousness had reached far enough that government agencies were using them to garner greater attention in public service messages.

Evolution of the zombie archetype

The flesh-hungry undead have been a fixture of world mythology dating at least since The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the goddess Ishtar promises:

     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 to eat the living!
     And the dead will outnumber the living!

Folklore about revenants and vampires, rotting corpses that would rise from the dead and consume the living, has existed for centuries. Undead creatures appear in Norse mythology and include the draugr, which is a reanimated corpse that roams outside of its grave to attack, eat, and infect the living. A human that is killed by a draugr is destined to become a draugr, as evident in the Eyrbyggja Saga when a shepherd is killed by a draugr.

The actor T. P. Cooke as Frankenstein's Monster in an 1823 stage production of the novel
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 undead-themed writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, by Lovecraft's own admission.

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", and "The Outsider" all deal with the undead, but the most definitive "zombie-type" 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.

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 zombie movies.

Avenging zombies would feature prominently in the early 1950s EC Comics such as Tales from the Crypt, which George A. Romero would later claim as an influence. The comics, including Tales, Vault of Horror and Weird Science, featured avenging undead in the Gothic tradition quite regularly, including adaptations of Lovecraft's stories which included "In the Vault", "Cool Air" and Herbert West–Reanimator.

The 1954 publication of I Am Legend, by author Richard Matheson, would further influence the zombie genre. It is the story of a future Los Angeles, overrun with undead bloodsucking beings. Notable as influential on the zombie genre is the portrayal of a worldwide apocalypse due to the infestation, in addition to the initial conception of vampirism as a disease (a scenario comparable to recent zombie media such as Resident Evil). The novel was a success, and would be adapted to film as The Last Man on Earth in 1964, as The Omega Man in 1971, and again in 2007 as I Am Legend.

Although classified as a vampire story and referred to as "the first modern vampire novel", Legend had definitive impact on the zombie genre by way of George A. Romero. Romero was heavily influenced by the novel and its 1964 adaptation when writing the film Night of the Living Dead, by his own admission. Critics have also noted extensive similarities between Night and Last Man on Earth, indicating further influence.

In 1968, George A. Romero released his low-budget film Night of the Living Dead, a taboo-breaking, genre-defining work that would prove to be more influential on the concept of zombies than any literary or cinematic work before it.

The name "zombie"

How these creatures came to be called "zombies" is not fully clear. Night of the Living Dead made no reference to them as "zombies", describing them instead as "ghouls". However, the word zombie is used continually by Romero in his 1978 script for his sequel Dawn of the Dead, including once in dialog. This "retroactively fits (the creatures) with an invisible Haitian/African prehistory, formally introducing the zombie as a new archetype". It has been argued however that the name is not truly applicable to these creatures because the zombie of Hatian Vodun is not a monster, but a victim.

One of the first books to expose western culture to the concept of the Vodun 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 claimed that the book "introduced 'zombi' into U.S. speech".

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 notable films including I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).

In his article, "The Evolution of the Zombie: the Monster That Keeps Coming Back", Shawn McIntosh notes that, "even after the traditional zombie largely disappeared from the screen, there was still a strong fascination with the word", and that "zombie" came to be applied to a wide variety of disfigured or deformed creatures throughout the 50s and 60s. However, even as they began to take on the shabbier, corpselike characteristics of later "zombies", these creatures always followed the Voodoo convention of being controlled by a master.

Zombie apocalypse

The zombie apocalypse is a particular scenario of apocalyptic fiction that customarily has a science fiction/horror rationale. In a zombie apocalypse, a widespread (usually global) rise of zombies hostile to human life engages in a general assault on civilization. Victims of zombies may become zombies themselves. This causes the outbreak to become an exponentially growing crisis: the spreading "zombie plague/virus" swamps normal military and law enforcement organizations, leading to the panicked collapse of civilian society until only isolated pockets of survivors remain, scavenging for food and supplies in a world reduced to a pre-industrial hostile wilderness.

The literary subtext of a zombie apocalypse is usually that civilization is inherently fragile in the face of truly unprecedented threats and that most individuals cannot be relied upon to support the greater good if the personal cost becomes too high, The narrative of a zombie apocalypse carries strong connections to the turbulent social landscape of the United States in the 1960s when the originator of this genre, the film Night of the Living Dead, was first created. Many also feel that zombies allow people to deal with their own anxiety about the end of the world. In fact the breakdown of society as a result of zombie infestation has been portrayed in countless zombie-related media since Night of the Living Dead. One scholar concluded that "more than any other monster, zombies are fully and literally apocalyptic ... they signal the end of the world as we have known it."

Due to a large number of thematic films and video games, the idea of a zombie apocalypse has entered the mainstream and there have been efforts by many fans to prepare for the hypothetical future zombie apocalypse. Efforts include creating weapons and selling posters to inform people on how to survive a zombie outbreak.

References:
1. Zombie (fictional). Wikipedia, February 27, 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/zombie_(fictional)>