Zombie (folklore)
A zombie is an undead person in the Afro-Caribbean and Creole spiritual belief system of Vodou. These folkloric zombies are human bodies re-animated by supernatural means and shamanistic medicine to create dread among the living. Other more macabre versions of zombies have become a staple of modern horror fiction, where they usually engage in human cannibalism.
Zombies in voodoo
According to the tenets of Vodou, a dead person can be revived by a bokor or mambo. Zombies remain under the control of the bokor or mambo since they have no will of their own. "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 Felicia wandering the streets in a daze thirty years after her death, as well as claiming the same with several other people. Hurston pursued rumours that the affected persons were given powerful drugs, but she was unable to locate individuals 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."[1]
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 can be turned into a zombie by the ingestion of two special powders. The first, coup de poudre (French: 'powder strike'), induced a 'death-like' state because of tetrodotoxin (TTX), its key ingredient. Tetrodotoxin is the same lethal toxin found in the Japanese delicacy fugu, or pufferfish. At near-lethal doses (LD50 of 1mg), it can leave a person in a state of near-death for several days, while the person continues to be conscious. The second powder, dissociative hallucinogens, put the person in a zombie-like state where they seem to have no will of their own. Davis also popularized the story of Clairvius Narcisse, who was claimed to have succumbed to this practice. There remains considerable skepticism about 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, causing quasi-hysterical amnesia, catatonia, or other psychological disorders, which are 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.
Zombies in folklore
In the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed that the souls of the 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. According to the "Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were," particularly in France during the Middle Ages, the revenant rises from the dead usually to avenge some crime committed against the entity, most likely a murder. The revenant usually took on the form of an emaciated corpse or skeletal human figure, and wandered around graveyards at night. The "draugr" of medieval Norse mythology were also believed to be the corpses of warriors returned from the dead to attack the living. The zombie appears in several other cultures worldwide, including China, Japan, the Pacific, India, and the Native Americans.
Zombies in literature and fiction
The first book to expose modern western culture to the concept of the zombie was The Magic Island by W.B. Seabrook in 1929.
Zombies are regularly encountered in horror- and fantasy-themed fiction, films, television shows, 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.
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.
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.
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 based on this story, as is the 1971 Charlton Heston film The Omega Man, though less faithfully. A new film version, starring Will Smith, is currently in pre-production.
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, 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, viral infection, and telepathic control.
In pop fiction, zombies can generally be disabled by removing the head, or destroying the brain. 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.
In the Dune series of novels by Frank Herbert, the Gholas are essentially clones grown in tanks from genetic material retrieved from the cells of a deceased subject. (Note the similarity to the word "ghoul".) The distinction between gholas and clones is that the ghola retains many personality characteristics of the dead person, and this can be unsettling to others. In the period of Dune, gholas are merely physical copies, but at the end of Dune Messiah, the ghola of Duncan Idaho recovers the memories of the original, essentially becoming a reincarnation of Idaho.
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. 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 novel Xombies is about a plague that turns women into the undead.
In comic books, Dark Horse Comics ZombieWorld series features various stories of the undead, told by various artists. 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. 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. A Marvel Comics miniseries called Marvel Zombies features an alternate Earth where a zombie plague has infected all the heroes and villains. 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. The webcomic Penny Arcade recently featured a storyline in which several of the strips recurring characters are trapped in a zombie-infested mall.
In the book, The Zombie Survival Guide, author Max Brooks standardizes zombies and 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 upcoming follow up book, World War Z, is a fictional look at various survivors first hand accounts of a major global zombie outbreak, told in mock interview-like fashion.
While it doesn't feature zombies outright, the webcomic Megatokyo does include much paranoia of a zombie outbreak, mostly felt by the character Largo. His comtempt 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.
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.
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 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. 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. The depiction of zombies staggering around slowly, moaning and in various states of decomposition, can also be traced back to Romero's movies. 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). The original movie made no reference to the creatures as "zombies," though 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." [2]
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. 1981's Night of the Zombies, starring Jamie Gillis, was the first film to reference a mutagenic gas as a source of zombie contagion, later echoed by Trioxin in 1985's Return of the Living Dead.
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) (released as Dead Alive in the US), Bob Balan's comedic 1993 film My Boyfriend's Back where a very self aware high school boy returns to profess his love for a girl and his love for human flesh, and Michele Soavi received rave reviews for Dellamorte Dellamore (1994) (released as Cemetery Man in the US), it was not until the next decade's box office successes (the Resident Evil movies (2002, 2004), 28 Days Later (2002) (a film with similarities to zombie films, and which could certainly be regarded as one depending on how loosely you choose to define the term 'zombie'), the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004), and the homage/parody Shaun of the Dead (2004) that the zombie subgenre experienced a resurgance. The new interest allowed Romero to create the fourth entry of his zombie series. In some of these recent films the zombies differ from previous versions. They retain the speed and agility that they had in life, have collective intelligence, or in the case of 28 Days Later are still living humans, and not actually zombies in the more limited sense.
Around the turn of this century, 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.
In Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, the beings known as "inferi" are zombies.
Zombies in television
Numerous storylines of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel featured zombies in various guises. Some resembled the voodoo model, while others craved human flesh, and had various degrees of autonomy. Other zombie storylines appeared on The X-Files and Charmed.
Michael Jackson's Thriller is a 1983 music video directed by John Landis. One of the most popular music videos of all time, 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 cartoon The Simpsons contains many references to zombies, most notably the Treehouse of Horror series.
One could argue that the Borg of television's Star Trek are a form of zombie. Transformed by nanotechnology and cybernetic implants, people attacked by the Borg go through a kind of death and reanimation. Like many depictions of zombies, they have grey-white skin and damaged bodies, shuffle about mindlessly, and travel in hordes seeking to make others like them, or failing that, "consume" their technology and leave the people dead. Recent depictions have them attacking their victims with twin stinger like "tubules", leaving vampire-like wounds in the necks of their victims--the start of the transformation process.
Zombies in gaming
Notes and references
1. Gallaher, Tim (1997). Zora Neale Hurston, American Author
External links
- Howstuffworks: How Zombies Work - discusses voodoo origins of zombies.