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Zombie
What are the defining characteristics of zombies?
Where did the idea of zombies come from?
Who is credited with the modern depiction of zombies in films?
How did zombies become popular in video games?
What was the purpose of the CDC’s “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse” campaign?
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Zombie, undead creature frequently featured in works of horror fiction and film. While its roots may possibly be traced back to the zombi of the Haitian Vodou religion, the modern fictional zombie was largely developed by the works of American filmmaker George A. Romero.
Characteristics
Although the word zombie has been applied to different types of creatures, they generally share a few defining characteristics, perhaps most importantly a lack of free will. Zombies are usually wholly subordinate, either to an outside force, such as a sorcerer, or to an overwhelming desire, such as the need for human flesh or revenge or simply to do violence. Another important distinction made by some is that a zombie is the animated corpse of a single being, usually a human. Zombies are frequently depicted as shambling and rotting, although in some instances their bodies may be preserved, especially when magic is involved, and they may sometimes display superhuman characteristics, such as increased strength and speed.
Zombies may be created in a variety of ways. Early depictions drew on Haitian Vodou, an Afro-Haitian religion that developed among descendants of enslaved West and Central Africans in colonial Saint-Domingue. Vodou combines African religious traditions with elements of Roman Catholicism introduced during the colonial period. It was believed that some Vodou practices were capable of reviving or controlling the dead. Haitian zombis were said to be created by malevolent priests and compelled to obey them.
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There are two potential parts to the Vodou process: First, a zombi astral is created by removing part of a person’s soul. Then this part of the soul may be used for further magic, including the revivification of the person’s corpse, or zombi corps cadavre. Methods of zombification developed in fiction include radiation exposure and contagion. Especially noteworthy in the latter case is the danger of a so-called “zombie apocalypse,” in which the eventual zombification of the human population through virulence seems inevitable. Zombies are often depicted as proliferating by killing or infecting others—usually by biting—who then become zombies themselves.
It is generally accepted that the impulse and drive experienced by the walking dead reside in the brain. Therefore removing the head or otherwise destroying the brain-body connection will stop them. Because zombies are in most cases already deceased, it is usually deemed impossible to kill them by methods such as gunshot, poisoning, or stabbing, unless the brain is damaged or destroyed. In instances where zombification is caused by magic, a zombie may potentially be stopped by the death of its master.
History
Haitian origins and early zombie beliefs
The word zombie itself entered the English lexicon in the 18th or 19th century, often attributed to British writer Robert Southey, although the idea of the walking dead had existed in various cultures for centuries.
The idea of zombism in fiction is widely believed to have been galvanized by the nonfiction book The Magic Island, a travelogue of Haiti by William Seabrook, first published in 1929, which detailed his observations of Vodou zombi. Seabrook recorded a very different figure from the flesh-eating zombie that later became familiar in horror films. A Haitian farmer named Constant Polynice allegedly told him that families sometimes protected the newly dead by building solid tombs, burying them close to homes or well-traveled paths, and watching over fresh graves until the bodies had begun to decay. They feared that a corpse might otherwise be taken from its grave, restored to resemble a living being through sorcery, and placed under another person’s control. Such a zombi did not roam in search of victims; its fate was grueling physical labor.
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Polynice illustrated this fate with an account of a group of supposed zombis working in the cane fields of the Haitian-American Sugar Company (HASCO) during the 1918 harvest. In his telling they labored without pay or freedom and were beaten when they slowed. Unlike the zombies of later popular culture, these figures were not threats to others but people stripped of their identity, autonomy, and individual will.
Similar ideas remained current when American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston conducted fieldwork in Haiti in the 1930s. In her book Tell My Horse (1938), she recorded Haitians describing zombies as bodies without souls, returned from death without ordinary freedom or awareness.
Hurston also investigated the celebrated case of Felicia Felix-Mentor, a woman whom local people identified as someone who had died and been buried in 1907 but had apparently reappeared in 1936. Hurston photographed the woman at a hospital but remained uncertain about what had actually happened. The image was later published in Life magazine as the first known photograph of a zombie. Hurston’s account again presents zombification chiefly as a feared loss of identity and control, far removed from the contagious flesh-eating monster that later came to dominate popular culture.
Zombies enter film
Three years after The Magic Island’s publication, the first feature-length zombie film, White Zombie—inspired by the book and by a stage play called Zombie—was released. In it a lovesick man conspires with a sorcerer (played by Bela Lugosi) to turn the object of his affections into a zombie just after she weds someone else, so that he may have control of her. The woman “dies” and is given a funeral but later rises from the dead through the powers of witchcraft.
More Vodou-influenced zombie films followed, including a loose sequel to White Zombie called Revolt of the Zombies (1936), King of the Zombies (1941), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). As the United States entered the atomic age, zombie and alien stories began to merge, as in the infamous Ed Wood-directed cult film Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) and Invisible Invaders (1959), in which aliens attempt to enslave the dead. By the 1940s zombies had also become a regular feature in comic books and pulp magazines, and it was in these media that they came to be depicted as rotting corpses rather than preserved ones.
George Romero and the modern zombie
A major turning point in zombie lore came with American filmmaker George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). This low-budget film—inspired in part by I Am Legend (1954), a novel by Richard Matheson that depicts vampires driven solely by a desire for blood—solidified the zombie concept that would persist for decades. The film revolves around a farmhouse full of people under attack by the walking dead, risen by vague means involving radiation. Romero intended the film to be more of a social commentary than a monster movie, and the narrative centers on the inability of the living to cooperate to save themselves from the undead threat. Ironically, the word zombie was not uttered in Night of the Living Dead; Romero himself was not influenced directly by Haitian folklore, and the creatures were simply referred to as “ghouls” or “flesh-eaters.”
Romero revisited both his ghouls, now known as zombies thanks to fans, and his social commentary—this time about the ills of consumerism—with Dawn of the Dead (1978), in which a handful of living people attempt to escape the undead by hiding in a shopping mall. He followed up with a number of related films over the next several decades: Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009).
Zombies in the 1980s and ’90s
Night of the Living Dead opened the doors for hundreds of zombie appearances in the years that followed, especially in the 1980s. These included an unauthorized Italian sequel to Dawn of the Dead, Zombi 2 (1979; also released as Zombie), and many more Italian zombie films that followed in its wake. In the United States the popular film Friday the 13th (1980) launched a horror franchise that would later feature the zombielike villain Jason Voorhees. In 1983 Michael Jackson released the video for his song “Thriller,” a horror-filled romp featuring dancing zombies. Zombie comedy began to gain steam, and humorous zombie films such as Night of the Comet (1984) followed. Romero’s Night coauthor, John Russo, worked on the first in a series of spin-offs of their seminal work, The Return of the Living Dead, which was released in 1985 and in turn spawned a number of sequels. In addition to being a popular zombie comedy, Return contributed the hunger for human brains to zombie lore.
Although the 1990s produced a remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990) and director Peter Jackson’s humorous gore fest Braindead (1992; also known as Dead Alive), the decade was perhaps most notable for bringing zombies to the forefront in video games. In 1996 the first game in the Resident Evil series (also known as Biohazard) debuted, in which protagonists attempt to navigate a zombie apocalypse caused by a virus. Several sequels were released for various game consoles, as well as a series of films based on the games. The House of the Dead, a light-gun arcade game, was released the following year. It also spawned several sequels and a big-screen adaptation in 2003. The popularity of zombie video games also contributed in part to the rise of Asian zombie films, including Hong Kong’s Bio-Zombie (1998; Chinese: Sun faa sau si) and many more in Japan.
The zombie boom of the 2000s
About the turn of the 21st century, zombies experienced a boom in popularity. Zombie books began to appear more and more frequently, with author Max Brooks releasing both the tongue-in-cheek The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (2003) and the best-selling apocalyptic novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006; film 2013).
Horror icon Stephen King even published a zombie novel during this time, Cell (2006). Also of note was Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), which took Jane Austen’s public-domain text and added a horror-spoof twist, and the comic book series The Walking Dead, which began in 2003 and was adapted for TV in 2010.
Zombie films and video games continued to gain popularity, with the zombie menace shifting from a shambling mob to rage-filled sprinters in Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic 28 Days Later (2002) and Zack Snyder’s big-budget remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) and in video games such as Dead Rising (2006) and Left 4 Dead (2008), both of which were followed by popular sequels.
Zombie comedy also experienced a revival, with the self-proclaimed British “rom-zom-com” (romantic-zombie-comedy) Shaun of the Dead (2004), which lampoons aspects of the zombie genre, paving the way for comedies such as Fido (2006), Dead Snow (2009; Norwegian: Død snø), and the box-office hit Zombieland (2009).
The expanding zombie genre
By the 2010s zombie stories had expanded further across television, international cinema, streaming, and video games.
The Walking Dead, which premiered in 2010, follows survivors of a zombie apocalypse. The original series concluded in 2022 after 11 seasons, but the show developed into a larger television franchise. South Korean productions became especially prominent. Yeon Sang-Ho’s film Train to Busan (2016), about passengers trapped inside a train during a viral outbreak, screened at the Cannes film festival, and the Korean series All of Us Are Dead (2022– ), depicting an outbreak at a high school, was among Netflix’s top 10 most-viewed titles in 91 countries during its first week.
Video games also continued to reshape the genre. Naughty Dog studio’s The Last of Us (2013), a survival-horror adventure game, follows Joel Miller and Ellie Williams across a devastated United States after an outbreak of a fictional mutated cordyceps fungus has brought human society close to collapse. Their journey is tied to the possibility of developing a vaccine. The game later inspired an HBO television series, which premiered in 2023.
From zombie walks to emergency preparedness
In the 21st century zombies came alive off the big screen and off the page. Large cities around the world were taken over by “zombie walks”—that is, mobs, sometimes spontaneously organized, of people in zombie costume. Some people offered zombie fitness classes or materials, through which participants learned skills that would purportedly help them survive a zombie apocalypse.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) went further, turning the convention to practical use. In May 2011 the agency published the blog post “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse” to promote emergency planning. It was followed with a graphic novel, Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic, in which a couple and their dog face a zombie outbreak. The story ends with a checklist for preparing for real emergencies.
The underlying lesson was simple: Many of the supplies and plans needed to survive a fictional zombie outbreak would also be useful during such real disasters as earthquakes, pandemics, or hurricanes. The CDC later reported that the campaign had proved an effective way to attract a wide audience to information about emergency preparedness.