Zombie (folklore)

For other uses see Zombie (disambiguation)

A zombie, at twilight, in a sugarcane field in Haiti

A zombie is traditionally an undead person in the Caribbean spiritual belief system of voodoo. Essentially a dead body re-animated by unnatural means, the zombie creates dread among the living. Zombies have become a staple of horror fiction, where they usually engage in the consumption of human flesh. The term "zombism" is sometimes used to refer to the condition or disease associated with being a zombie.

Zombies in voodoo

According to the tenets of voodoo, a dead person can be revived by a houngan or mambo. After resurrection, it has no will of its own, but remains under the control of the person who performed the ritual. Such resurrected dead are called "zombies".

Zombi is also the name of the voodoo snake god of Niger-Congo origin; it is akin to the Kongo word nzambi, which means "god."

In 1937, while researching folklore in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston encountered the case of Felicia Felix-Mentor, who had died and been buried in 1907 at the age of 29. Villagers believed they saw her wandering the streets in a daze thirty years later [1] (although this was subsequently found to be false [2]). Hurston pursued rumours that the affected persons were given powerful drugs, but was unable to locate anyone willing to offer much information. She wrote:

"What is more, if science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than gestures of ceremony."[3]

Several decades later, Wade Davis, a Canadian 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 travelled to Haiti in 1982 and, as a result of his investigations, claimed that a living person could be zombified by the ingestion of two special powders. The first, coup de poudre (french: 'powder strike' - a wordplay on coup de foudre, 'lightning-strike'), induced a 'death-like' state, the key ingredient of which was tetrodotoxin (TTX). The second powder of dissociative hallucinogens held the person in a will-less zombie state. Davis popularized the story of Clairvius Narcisse, who was claimed to have succumbed to this practice. (Tetrodotoxin is the lethal toxin found in the Japanese delicacy fugu, or pufferfish (Tetraodontiformes). At near-lethal doses (LD50 of 1mg), it is said to be able to leave a person in a state near death for several days, while the person continues to be conscious.) There remains considerable skepticism to Davis's claims, and opinions remain divided as to the veracity of his work.

Others have discussed the contribution of the victim's own belief-system, possibly leading to compliance with the attacker's will, and causing quasi-hysterical amnesia, catatonia, or other psychological disorders, which are then later misinterpreted as a return from the dead. 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.

See also: History of Haiti

Zombies in folklore

In the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed that the souls of dead could return to earth and haunt the living. The belief in revenants (someone who has returned from the dead) are well documented by contemporary European writers of the time. The "draugr" of medieval Norse mythology were also believed to be the corpses of warriors returned from the dead to attack the living.

Zombies in fiction

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 independently malevolent. This changed with the publication of I Am Legend by author Richard Matheson in (1954). The story of a future Los Angeles, overrun with undead cannibalistic/bloodsucking beings changed the genre forever. One man is the sole survivor of a pandemic of a bacterium that causes vampirism. Continually, he must fight to survive attacks from the rambling, slow-witted creatures. Although ostensibly a vampire story, it had enormous impact on the zombie genre, particularly the film maker George Romero.

Zombies are regularly encountered in horror- and fantasy-themed fiction, films, video games 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.

Many works of fiction feature zombies who spread their affliction from one to another, in a viral fashion. More often than not, the condition is spread through means of a bite or scratch, and the victim will most likely die and mutate soon after. In others, however, the condition is only acquired after death.

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 other toxic chemicals acting on the brains of the dead, evil magic or voodoo, aliens, Nanotechnology, the use of drugs, viral infection, and telepathic control.

In fiction zombies can generally be disabled by dismemberment or destruction of the brain and/or upper spinal column. 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.

Zombies in literature

In the novel Perelandra, the zombie Professor Weston acts as the analog of the serpent in the Garden of Eden; this is a rare example of a zombie who can talk, as it is actually being controlled by a demon.

In the Xanth series by Piers Anthony the zombies are re-animated by a magical talent held by the "Zombie Master" Jonathan. He can re-animate any creature, human or otherwise, and have it under his personal control. Even when he kills himself, he returns to life as a member of the undead. The zombies of Xanth can continually fall apart without losing any mass.

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". Several other Discworld zombies, including Mr. Slant, work as unsympathetic lawyers.

In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling, an Inferius is essentially a zombie, a dead body controlled by a dark wizard's spells.

In contemporary horror fiction, Leisure Books has published Brian Keene's debut novel The Rising and its sequel City of the Living Dead], which deal with a worldwide apocalypse of intelligent zombies, apparently caused by demonic possession. Walter Greatshell's novel Xombies is about a plague that turns women into the undead.

Underpants of the Dead, a zombie satire co-authored by Bob Hinton and C.W. Prather, was serialized online from October 2003 through January 2005 on CountGore.com. Another work of zombie fiction that was initially published online, David Wellington's Monster Island, is scheduled to be available through Thunder's Mouth press in 2006.

Zombies in film

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 1930's until they started to move around more of their own accord, as in I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943).

A young zombie and her victim, from Night of the Living Dead (1968)

In 1968, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead premiered. Critics initially reacted negatively to its depiction of cannibalism, gore, and pessimism, but the film soon developed a strong following and is now considered a modern classic. Though cannibalism in horror was nothing new at the time, the movie standardised the practice of eating human flesh in zombies, and created new rules still in use today, such as a severe head injury being the only way to kill a zombie. Romero's even more successful sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1978), can be regarded as the father of the modern zombie movie subgenre. The third entry in the series was Day of the Dead (1985), followed two decades later by the fourth entry Land of the Dead (2005).

Internationally, Dawn of the Dead was released under the name Zombi, inspiring Italian director Lucio Fulci to create Zombi II (1979), an unofficial sequel to Dawn of the Dead, which would be released in North America as Zombie and spawn its own series. 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.

After the mid-1980s, the subgenre became mostly relegated to the underground. Although director Peter Jackson made a notable entry with the ultra-gory Braindead (1992), and Michele Soavi received rave reviews for Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), it was not until the next decade's box office successes (the Resident Evil movies (2002, 2004), 28 Days Later (2002), the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004), and homage/parody Shaun of the Dead (2004) ) that the zombie subgenre began to resurface, even allowing George Romero to create a fourth part to his zombie series.

Although 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle claims it is not a zombie film (the 'Infected' are not dead), it shares all of the basic characteristics of a zombie movie, and references the genre. It was largely responsible for the creation of what has been referred to as the "MTV zombie": this modern variety is much faster than the shambling hordes of the earlier generation.

It is a tradition that, within zombie films, the human characters never say the word "zombie", but use designations like "them", "those things", "creatures", "corpses", "bodies", "ghouls", etc. This formed the basis for the scene in Shaun of the Dead where Simon Pegg said "Don't say that" to Nick Frost when he used the aforementioned word. However, in Land of the Dead and the original Dawn of the Dead, a character from each film breaks this tradition once.

See also: List of zombie movies

Zombies in gaming

Zombies are common foes in horror-themed computer and video games. Zombies are a staple of the survival horror genre of video games, such as Lucasarts' Zombies Ate My Neighbors and the influential Resident Evil series. Many other genres, especially fantasy role-playing and adventure games, also prominently feature zombies as enemies. Some titles, such as Stubbs the Zombie, put the player into the role of the zombie itself.

There is also an award-winning tile-based strategy boardgame entitled Zombies!!! in which players attempt to escape a zombie-infested city, or kill 25 zombies.

See also: Zombies in computer and video games

Zombies on the Internet

A number of Internet websites are also dedicated to the genre, notably Homepage of the Dead, Jim Rage's Elite Zombie Hunting Squad and Zombie Squad. An increasingly popular Internet meme is the use of online journal websites such as LiveJournal to create a fictional account of an undead apocalypse; the most well-known of these are Alpha Dog and Day By Day Armageddon, but other popular journals include:

• Shattered Death
• Life After Death
• Man In A Dead World
• Underpants of the Dead
• End Times
• The Milledgeville Papers

The Flash-based web cartoon series Xombie also features zombies, both as protagonists and antagonists.

External links

• Howstuffworks: How Zombies Work - discusses voodoo origins of zombies.
• Triple J's Dr Karl explains the pharmacological way to make a zombie.
• Zombie Infection Simulator (requires Java).
• Urban Dead A browser-based MMORPG dealing with a zombie apocalypse.
• The Combat Guide A website with media and reading covering the survival of a "zompocalypse".