A Brief History of Zombies

Zombies first entered the popular American consciousness after George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968. The zombie is typically depicted as an undead human with a slow, lumbering gait which yearns to chew on the flesh of their unzombified counterparts (brains would seem a particular delicacy among the Zombified), and can sustain injuries no living human would survive. To kill a zombie you need good enough aim to shoot the head, or a highly powerful flamethrower, according to most accounts. They travel in packs and hunt doggedly and relentlessly. While they might seem laughably slow, you’ll get tired before they do, no matter how fast you run.

Some more recent depictions of zombies have them moving as quick as live humans, giving them a slightly more realistic method of instilling fear, and explain the zombie phenomena and growing numbers of zombie-like creatures much like the popular vampire myth, through a bite, which transmits a virus, transforming normal healthy humans into brain-thirsty undead mutants, such as in the Resident Evil series.

Unlike many of our favorite Halloween monsters, like vampires and werewolves, zombie mythology for the most part does not share its origins across many cultures. Instead, the idea of the zombie comes from the practice of Vodou (more frequently spelled voodoo). According to legend, live humans can be converted, by a powerful sorcerer into mindless agents of that sorcerers goal and controlled. Interestingly, most pop-cultural depictions of zombies do not include a sorcerer as the genesis of their being. The voodoo connection was explored by Wade Davis in the book and film of The Serpent and The Rainbow.