Zombie

Main article: Zombie

The Zombie Survival Guide

Zombies are regularly encountered in horror- and fantasy-themed fiction, films, television shows, video games, Halloween parties, and role-playing games. They are typically depicted as mindless, shambling, decaying corpses with a hunger for human flesh, and in some cases, human brains in particular.

Prior to the mid-1950s, zombies were usually presented as mindless thralls controlled like puppets by mystical masters. Sometimes the zombies were reanimated corpses, and sometimes living humans, but never malevolent by their own will. There was sometimes a strong sexual component in the depiction of these mindless beings.

In print

Frontispiece of Zombi du grand Pérou

Probably the first reference in Western literature to a zombie was in "Pierre-Corneille" (actually Paul-Alexis) Blessebois' satirical French novel from 1697, Le Zombi du grand Pérou ("The Zombie of the great Peru")

The first use cited by the on-line French dictionary, the Tresor de la Langue Francaise, is a mention a hundred years later, in 1797, by Moreau de Saint-Méry in Description topographique et politique de la partie espagnole de l'isle Saint-Domingue (a book on what would become Haiti). Moreau says that it is a creole word meaning "spirit, ghost" (specifically, in French, a revenant, that is, a "returning" person). He also mentions that, in one place on the island, slaves buried their dead despite being forbidden to do so, and that floods sometimes brought them back to the surface. One can readily imagine that this fact might have influenced later ideas of zombies as actual revived corpses.

Neither of these sources, however, seems to have had an enduring effect on Western literature. The first book to expose more recent western culture to the concept of the zombie was The Magic Island by W.B. Seabrook in 1929.

The American horror author H. P. Lovecraft wrote several stories that explored the zombie or undead theme from different angles. His short story "Cool Air" centers around an undead doctor who must live in a refrigerated apartment to keep his body from decomposing. He also wrote a series of tales about Herbert West, a "re-animator" who attempts to revive human corpses with mixed results. In "The Thing on the Doorstep" a friend of the narrator suffers a gruesome fate when his mind is transported against his will into a semi-rotted dead body. Further, "Pickman's Model" is a tale of zombie-like beings who may rise from underneath Boston to feed on the flesh of the living.

The depiction of zombies in mass media changed with the 1954 publication of I Am Legend by author Richard Matheson. It is the story of a future Los Angeles, overrun with undead bloodsucking beings. One man is the sole survivor of a pandemic caused by a bacterium that infects humans and causes vampirism. He must fight to survive nightly attacks by the creatures on his fortified home, as well as gather supplies, and hunt them during the daylight, and deal with being alone in the world. Although ostensibly a vampire story, it had enormous impact on the zombie genre when it influenced the film maker George A. Romero in his making of the first modern take on zombies, the film Night of the Living Dead. The film The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price is also based on Matheson's story, as is the 1971 Charlton Heston film The Omega Man, though less faithfully.

Many works of fiction feature zombies who spread their affliction from one to another, in a disease-like fashion. More often than not, the condition is spread through means of a bite or scratch, or direct contact with blood, and the victim will most likely die and mutate soon after. In others instances the condition is simply acquired after death of any kind.

A common plot in zombie fiction is an outbreak of the zombie plague growing out of control, resulting in an apocalyptic scenario. The story then focuses around a small group of survivors attempting to either stop the plague, or merely survive and escape the destruction. In typical horror fashion, zombie fiction rarely has a happy ending, generally ending in a dark or ambiguous manner. Popular causes of zombie outbreaks in fiction include radiation or toxic chemicals acting on the brains of the dead, evil magic or voodoo, aliens, nanotechnology, the use of drugs, telepathic control, or as is most common in modern zombie horror, viral infection.

In pop fiction, zombies can generally be disabled by destroying the brain, or removing the head from the body. In a few cases the entire body of the zombie must be destroyed, generally by burning, as individual body parts continue to move after being severed from the body.

In the Xanth series by Piers Anthony the zombies are re-animated by a magical talent held by Jonathan the Zombie Master. He can re-animate any deceased creature, human or otherwise, and have it under his personal control. Even when he commits suicide, he himself returns to life as a member of the undead. The zombies of Xanth can continually fall apart without losing any mass. However in the Xanth series if a zombie is able to find love and be loved by a living person they are able to return to a near-living state. Though they are technically still a zombie, they no longer appear decaying or rotted.

The character of Reginald Shoe in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books becomes a zombie by refusing to stay dead after being shot and killed. He later forms a support group for other undead, claiming they are merely "differently alive" and "Undead, yes! Unperson, no!". Several other Discworld zombies, including Mr. Slant, work as unsympathetic lawyers. This is one of the few areas of fiction where zombies retain all memory and cognitive function.

In contemporary horror fiction, Leisure Books has published Brian Keene's debut novel The Rising and its sequel City Of The Dead, which deal with a worldwide apocalypse of intelligent zombies, apparently caused by demonic possession.

Walter Greatshell's novels Xombies and Xombie Rama are semi-horror satires (proclaimed by the author) about a plague that turns women into the undead.

In the book, The Zombie Survival Guide, author Max Brooks shows the difference between voodoo zombies and hollywood zombies and explains the virus he calls the Solanum virus and its symptoms. It also goes on to explain ways to survive in his four different stages of zombie out-breaks. The levels range from a handful confined locally to complete world domination. His follow-up book, World War Z, documents the aftermath of a world-wide zombie outbreak.

Zombie is the title of Michael Slade's fifth book in the Special X series of crime novels, it is also known as Evil Eye.

In the dystopian novel NOIR by K. W. Jeter, anyone who dies in debt is reanimated as a zombie, forced to keep working until they have paid off their debts.

In Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, the beings known as "inferi" are like zombies. They are controlled by a powerful wizard and are more like puppets than reanimated dead with rudimentary cravings.

Famed horror novelist Stephen King published a zombie novel with Cell, which concerns a struggling young artist on a trek from Boston to Maine in hopes of saving his family from a possible worldwide zombie outbreak. In King's novel, people who answer their cell phones are affected by what is called the Pulse, an electromagnetic shot through the communication network that wipes a cell phone users brain, causing only primal instincts to remain that simulate zombie-like actions. An earlier short story King authored, "Home Delivery," is a more traditional treatment of zombie story.

In comic books, Marvel Comics published one of the first ongoing series about a zombie, Zombie. Their zombie returned in Max comics' Zombie. The Walking Dead series by Robert Kirkman is an attempt at an ongoing story set in a zombie infested world, following the same group of characters as they attempt to survive. Marvel later hired Kirkman to pen Marvel Zombies, an alternate reality story where its heroes and villains are all zombies. IDW Publishing produced a zombie series, as did Boom! Studios an anthology. Dark Horse Comics' ZombieWorld series features various stories of the undead, told by various artists. In the comic series The Goon by Eric Powell the prominent villain is a necromancer who constantly rejuvenates his undead army by employing lepers to rob the graves of the town cemetery. In the Tokyopop comic The Abandoned by Ross Campbell, everyone aged 23 and older turns into zombies, forcing teens to fend for themselves against undead grown-ups.

Zombies are also prominent in many webcomics. Penny Arcade featured a storyline in which several of the strip's recurring characters are trapped in a zombie-infested mall to celebrate the release of the game Dead Rising. While it doesn't feature zombies outright, Megatokyo does include much paranoia of a zombie outbreak, mostly felt by the character Largo. His contempt for zombies and other such monsters (despite mistaking ravers for zombies) has led to use of the catchphrase, "I loathe the undead", a sentimentality used by gamers and readers of the comic. Fetus-X stars an artist with a zombie arm that paints comics stitched-together skin, as well as a brain-eating psychic zombie fetus. Cat and Girl uses Zombie Joseph Beuys as a recurring secondary character. Sluggy Freelance has had several different kinds of zombies in different story arcs, including "deadels" raised by a powerful demon that are parodies of Evil Dead 's deadites, geek zombies, actors playing zombies, and most recently "ghouls", who are styled after 28 Days Later 's living rage virus cannibals.

Wet Work, a 1993 novel by Philip Nutman, describes the after effects of a comet that raises the dead as zombies and kills millions more due to mutating diseases, ending in a world-wide holocaust.

One of the more memorable appearances of zombies in print occurred in Jim Butcher's novel Dead Beat, part of the Dresden Files series; in it, zombies are corpses raised by evil wizards in a manner vaguely reminiscent of the monster's voudoun origins, and controlled by means of a steady beat - usually a small drum or the like. In the novel's climactic scene, Harry Dresden manages to use a one-man-band apparatus and a museum exhibit to raise Sue, the famous tyrannosaur, as an immensely powerful zombie.

In film

See also: List of zombie films

A zombie with his victim in cult movie Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

A young zombie (Kyra Schon) feeding on human flesh, from Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Although the depiction of zombies in film has recently become much more varied, they were originally presented in White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932) as mindless, unthinking henchmen under the spell of an evil magician/overlord. This depiction continued through the 1930s until they started to move around more of their own accord, as in I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943). There was often a strong sexual component in the depiction of zombies of this era.

In 1968, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead premiered. Critics initially reacted negatively to its depiction of cannibalism and gore and the movie's pessimistic tone, but the film soon developed a strong following and is now considered a modern classic. Although cannibalism in horror was nothing new at the time, the movie standardised the depiction of zombies eating human flesh, and created new rules still in use in films, such as a severe head injury being the only way to kill a zombie. Zombies being shown staggering around slowly, moaning and in various states of decomposition, can also be traced back to Romero's films. The 1978 sequel, Dawn of the Dead, can be regarded as the precursor to the modern zombie movie subgenre. The third entry in the series was Day of the Dead (1985), followed two decades later by the fourth, Land of the Dead (2005). The original movie made no reference to the creatures as "zombies," but rather as "ghouls", although the word was used once in the sequel. It is quite likely that the term "zombie" was coined in reference to the trance-like stupor of the creatures, not their cannibalistic tendencies. By 2005, the term was accepted by Romero, with the Land of the Dead character Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) exorting "Zombies, man. They creep me out." [1]

Internationally, Dawn of the Dead was released under the name Zombi, just months before Lucio Fulci's Zombi II (1979), which was in fact filmed at the same time as Romero's Dawn, despite the popular belief that it was made in order to cash in on the success of Dawn. The only reference to Dawn was the title change to Zombi II. In America, Dan O'Bannon's 1985 movie, Return of the Living Dead, took a more comedic approach to distinguish his movie from George Romero's; it had the zombies hunger specifically for brains instead of all human flesh. 1981's Night of the Zombies was the first film to reference a mutagenic gas as a source of zombie contagion, later echoed by Trioxin in Return of the Living Dead.

After the mid-1980s, the subgenre was mostly relegated to the underground. Notable entries include director Peter Jackson's ultra-gory film Braindead (1992) (released as Dead Alive in the U.S.), Bob Balaban's comic 1993 film My Boyfriend's Back where a self-aware high school boy returns to profess his love for a girl and his love for human flesh, and Michele Soavi's Dellamorte Dellamore (1994) (released as Cemetery Man in the U.S.),

The turn of the millennium coincided with a decade of box office successes in which the zombie subgenre experienced a resurgence: the Resident Evil movies in 2002 and 2004, the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004), the British films 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later (2002, 2007) and the homage/parody Shaun of the Dead (2004). The new interest allowed Romero to create the fourth entry in his zombie series: Land of the Dead.

As part of this resurgence, there have been numerous direct-to-video (or DVD) zombie movies made by extremely low-budget filmmakers using digital video. These can usually be found for sale online from the distributors themselves, rented in video rental stores or released internationally in such places as Thailand. One such indie short is Dead Shit from writer/director Kevin Strange of Hack Movies.

On television

Numerous storylines of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel featured zombies in various guises. Some resembled the voodoo model ("Dead Man's Party"), while others craved human flesh, and had various degrees of autonomy ("The Thin Dead Line", "Habeas Corpses" and "You're Welcome"). Other zombies such as Maggie Walsh and Adam, closer fit a pseudo-scientific "Frankenstein's monster" model. Other zombie storylines appeared on The X-Files and Charmed ("Death Becomes Them").

File:Thriller Video Clip.jpg

A screenshot from the Thriller music video with the zombie backup dancers

Michael Jackson's Thriller is a 1983 music video directed by John Landis. One of the most popular music videos of all time, it is a horror film parody featuring choreographed zombies performing with Jackson. During the video, Jackson transforms into both a zombie and a werewolf.

In the South Park episode "Pinkeye", zombies overrun the town. In the episode, Chef is turned into a zombie based on the zombie played by Michael Jackson in the Thriller video.

Professional wrestler Tim Arson wrestled as "The Zombie" on the debut of ECW's program on Sci-Fi Channel, losing to Sandman.

The popular animated sitcom The Simpsons contains occasional references to zombies, most notably the Treehouse of Horror episodes.

Futurama, created by Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame, also references zombies, specifically "Zombie Jesus" ("Sweet Zombie Jesus, it's huge!") and "Hanukka Zombie", though they are never seen on screen.

The Borg from various Star Trek incarnations resemble zombies. In Star Trek: First Contact, one of the characters refers to the Borg as "bionic zombies."

In the 7th and final season of Macgyver, the episode "Walking Dead" is largely about zombies. The powder used is supposedly derived from the Blowfish or puffer fish.

In the Supernatural television series, The Demon is capable of assigning a sulphur based virus that turns people into zombie-like beings.

The third season of Sliders featured an episode named "Sole Survivor" wherein the cast slides into a world whose population has turned into zombie-like creatures.

In one episode of the anime series Samurai Champloo the main characters find themselves in a mysterious area populated by revived corpses from the Heike era under the control of a necromancer using them to excavate the Heike's long-lost war treasury.

Much of the anime series Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpucho revolves around the undead.

In Season 3 of the anime series Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, various students become zombies. They are still alive, but their personality mirrors that of non-anime zombies, except all that the zombie students think about is dueling.

In gaming

Further information: List of video games featuring zombies

Zombies are common foes in horror-themed computer and video games, as well as being a primary element in games such as Silent Hill, Zombie Revenge, the Resident Evil series, Dead Rising and House of the Dead. They are also a prominent occurrence in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game and Quake 4. A popular modification to Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source combines both teams in an effort to repel the attacks of zombies, controlled by randomly selected gamers, and to avoid becoming a zombie themselves. However, there are a few games in which players control a zombie character such as in Stubbs the Zombie, Gungrave, and various MMORPG's including Everquest 2.

Outside of video games, zombies also frequently appear in fantasy-themed trading card games like Magic: The Gathering, as well as in traditional fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. The RPG All Flesh Must Be Eaten is premised upon a zombie outbreak and features rules for zombie campaigns in many historical settings. In Table-top wargames (fantasy or not) zombies are frequently seen as cannon fodder for the undead race (such as the Vampire Counts of Warhammer Fantasy, the plague Zombies of Warhammer 40K, and the Necropolis army in Warlord)

Zombie is Monster in My Pocket #29, and is allied with the evil monsters in the comic book. He is the first foe encountered in the video game. Also, The Sims 2 PC Game features a re-animation state, in which Sims plead for the life of a dying Sim to the Grim Reaper, and he compromises by letting that Sim live as a leg-dragging Zombie who lives forever and "thinks of brains" a lot!

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The Zombies!!! board game box

The award-winning Zombies!!! series of boardgames see players attempting to escape from a zombie-infested city. Cheapass Games Give Me the Brain is a card game set in a fast food restaurant staffed by minimum-wage zombies.

Urban Dead, a popular online MMORPG, allows players to explore the fictional city of Malton as either a zombie or a trapped citizen, gaining skills and experience points.

In Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft, a faction of Undead, known as The Scourge, is a prominent force that could be considered zombies. Along with them, there is also a faction called The Forsaken, members of The Horde, who are free willed zombies. While not called zombies in-game (Undead is the preferred terminology), the creatures pose similar attributes to zombies.

Dead Rising, is a game released in 2006. It resembles George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, insofar as it puts the player in charge of a character trapped in a mall surrounded by zombies. The zombies break in and the character must find out where they came from and save the hapless inhabitants of the mall, all within the time period of 72 hours.

A comical zombie pirate called LeChuck features as the main antagonist in the Monkey Island game series, during which he is on a mission to destroy the protagonist, capture his girlfriend/fiancée and make her his own zombie bride. LeChuck is vastly different to the more well-known type of zombie as he is capable of communication and strategising, is fully aware of his actions and does not 'feed' on living flesh.

In the popular Microsoft game Halo, alien parasites reanimate sentient bodies. Once reanimated the bodies can take massive damage. Unlike common zombies, the Flood does not care if it is decapitated - the parasite controlling the body is located in the chest cavity. The Flood, as they are called, kill and reanimate as many bodies as they can on a planet, and then move on to other planets by using the host race's technology. (However, many zombie experts will argue that The Flood is not technically a zombie occurrence. In the first Halo game, and corroborated by the novel series, the captain of the "Pillar of Autumn", Keyes, may be considered by some to still be alive within the Flood that took over his body. In almost every reiteration of reanimation, the host MUST be dead, it is one of the basic bounds of being a zombie.)

In the world of Sigil in the PC game Planescape: Torment, citizens can sign a contract that will promise their body to the Dustmen faction for use as a zombie labourer after they die.

Zombies are also a rather common enemy in the Final Fantasy series. Oftentimes, they can be heavily damaged by healing magic and/or items.

The Metal Slug series has several games where it is possible to become two types of undead, Zombies (who puke on the player) and Mummies (who spurt purple gas). Being hit by zombie vomit has the player die, decompose, and be resurrected by a lightning strike, in the space of three seconds.

Undead creatures such as zombies are commonly found in dungeons and caves within The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

In the game Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time the Sand Creatures are somewhat zombie-like, but are not dead, nor living.

In Diablo I and II, there are many zombie creatures labeled as "Undead" or something related to that. They appear in all 5 acts of the game.

On the internet and in animation

More recently, through Macromedia Flash, several online animated shorts have covered the zombie genre. Rob Denbleyker's stick figure animation 'Joe Zombie' follows a story with similar aspects to Resident Evil, where a laboratory conducting scientific experiments creates various super-soldiers, one of which is killed and returns as a zombie to seek his revenge.

Another animated series is James Farr's 'Xombie'. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, it attempts to separate itself from other zombie stories by exploring what would happen if a zombie were to retain its consciousness postmortem.

'Dead End Days', a Canadian live action 48-episode video series about zombies and humans coexisting in a post-war world, ran on the Internet between October 2003 and November 2004. Although predating it by two years, it shared several thematic and plot elements with a UK zombie film, Shaun of the Dead.

Several websites document the zombie phenomenon as if it were factual, most prominently that of the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency.

Viral is a screen shot movie style comic made using Garry's Mod. It is produced by Freaks of Nature Comics and set in the S.T.U.D. universe. The series debuted on January 27, 2007, at the FacePunch Studios forums. The second episode is slow in coming, but in production.

War of the Dead: Z.E.R.O. is a live-action web series that began in 2007.

Zombie College was a Mondo Mini Shows series that ran on the Icebox website.

In music

Zombies and horror have become so popular that many songs and bands have been based off of these flesh-eating ghouls.

Horror punk

File:Smp - (c) smp macky kills.jpg

The band Send More Paramedics, which takes it's name from a line in the film The Return of the Living Dead

Some bands base their whole genre on zombies taking up the names zombiecore, horror punk/rock, deathrock, or monster rock. Success has been mostly underground, but the horror punk following includes bands such as The Misfits, and lesser known groups such as:

• 45 grave
• Balzac
• The Black Dahlia Murder
• The Coffin Caddies
• Desade
• The Flaming Tsunamis
• Mortician
• Nekromantix
• Send More Paramedics
• Wednesday 13 of Murderdolls, Wednesday 13, and Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13
• Zombie Apocalypse
• Zombina and The Skeletones

Pop

Probably the first band to associate themselves with the undead were The Zombies, a mid-1960s English pop group, though they did not incorporate any mention of zombies in their lyrics or image.

Michael Jackson's "Thriller", while not mentioning zombies specifically, warns that "the dead start to walk in their masquerade," and Vincent Price's closing rap to the song tells of "grizzy ghouls from every tomb ... closing in to seal your doom."

Many modern bands take a humorous approach to zombies, playing off the kitsch of early zombie flicks. Junior Senior includes a scene in the video for Move Your Feet where a squirrel runs over three with a De Lorean DMC-12.

The lead track, "Zombie Me," on rock band No More Kings' self-titled 2007 album, tells about the singer turning into a zombie and the challenges that his new zombie life brings.

Rock

The alternative rock band The Cranberries released a hit song entitled "Zombie", while Fela Kuti released an album called Zombie in 1976.

The Aquabats! song "Fashion Zombies" features fashion-obsessed zombies and the video parallels many movies in which the zombies inevitably win, in this case, transforming the band members into zombies.

Psychobilly

Psychobilly group HorrorPops have two songs about zombies, "Where They Wander" and "Walk Like a Zombie".

Heavy metal/death metal

Many metal bands, such as Impetigo and Splatterhouse, have songs or themes around zombies. There is even an underground genre called Zombie Death Metal.

The music of Rob Zombie and his former band White Zombie contains recurring themes of the undead, zombies, and witches and often pays homage to horror movies of the 50s and 60s.