Zombie (fiction)

George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead is considered a progenitor of the fictional zombie of modern culture.

Zombies are fictional undead creatures regularly encountered in horror and fantasy themed works. They are typically depicted as mindless, reanimated corpses with a hunger for human flesh, and particularly for human brains in some depictions. Although they share their name and some superficial similarities with the zombie from Haitian Vodun, their links to such folklore are unclear and many consider George A. Romero's seminal film The Night of the Living Dead to be the progenitor of these creatures. Flesh-eating zombies have a complex literary heritage, with antecedents ranging from Richard Matheson and H. P. Lovecraft to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, all drawing on European folklore of the flesh-hungry undead. The zombie apocalypse, the civilized world brought low by a global zombie infestation, has become a staple of modern popular art. By 2011 the influence of zombies in popular consciousness had reached far enough that the United States government's Center for Disease Control used the idea as a theme to promote disaster preparedness.

Evolution of the zombie archetype

The flesh-hungry undead have been a fixture of world mythology dating at least since The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the goddess Ishtar promises:

I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,

I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,

and will let the dead go up to eat the living!

And the dead will outnumber the living!

Folklore about revenants and vampires, rotting corpses that would rise from the dead and consume the living, has existed for centuries. Undead creatures appear in Norse mythology and include the draugr, which is a reanimated corpse that roams outside of its grave to attack, eat, and infect the living. A human that is killed by a draugr is destined to become a draugr, as evident in the Eyrbyggja Saga when a shepherd is killed by a draugr.

The actor T. P. Cooke as Frankenstein's Monster in an 1823 stage production of the novel

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, while not a zombie novel proper, prefigures many 20th century ideas about zombies in that the resurrection of the dead is portrayed as a scientific process rather than a mystical one, and that the resurrected dead are degraded and more violent than their living selves. Frankenstein, published in 1818, has its roots in European folklore, whose tales of vengeful dead also informed the evolution of the modern conception of vampires as well as zombies. Later notable 19th century stories about the avenging undead included Ambrose Bierce's The Death of Halpin Frayser, and various Gothic Romanticism tales by Edgar Allan Poe. Though their works could not be properly considered zombie fiction, the supernatural tales of Bierce and Poe would prove influential on later undead-themed writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, by Lovecraft's own admission.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the American horror author H. P. Lovecraft wrote several novelettes that explored the undead theme from different angles. "Cool Air", "In the Vault", and "The Outsider" all deal with the undead, but the most definitive "zombie-type" story in Lovecraft's oeuvre was 1921's Herbert West–Reanimator, which "helped define zombies in popular culture". This Frankenstein-inspired series featured Herbert West, a mad scientist who attempts to revive human corpses with mixed results. Notably, the resurrected dead are uncontrollable, mostly mute, primitive and extremely violent; though they are not referred to as zombies, their portrayal was prescient, anticipating the modern conception of zombies by several decades.

The 1936 film Things to Come, based on the novel by H. G. Wells, anticipates later zombie films with an apocalyptic scenario surrounding "the wandering sickness", a highly contagious viral plague that causes the infected to wander slowly and insensibly, very much like zombies, infecting others on contact. Things to Come has been regarded as an early example of the genre in which a small number of people survive in a "devastated landscape menaced by voracious enemies" and has been compared favorably to modern zombie movies.

Avenging zombies would feature prominently in the early 1950s EC Comics such as Tales from the Crypt, which George A. Romero would later claim as an influence. The comics, including Tales, Vault of Horror and Weird Science, featured avenging undead in the Gothic tradition quite regularly, including adaptations of Lovecraft's stories which included "In the Vault", "Cool Air" and Herbert West–Reanimator.

Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend, although classified as a vampire story and referred to as "the first modern vampire novel", would nonetheless have definitive impact on the zombie genre by way of George A. Romero. The novel and its 1964 film adaptation, The Last Man on Earth, which concern a lone human survivor waging war against a world of vampires, would by Romero's own admission greatly influence his 1968 low-budget film Night of the Living Dead; a work that would prove to be more influential on the concept of zombies than any literary or cinematic work before it.

George A. Romero and the modern zombie film

See also: List of zombie films

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

The modern conception of the zombie owes itself almost entirely to George A. Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. In his films, Romero "bred the zombie with the vampire, and what he got was the hybrid vigour of a ghoulish plague monster". This entailed an apocalyptic vision of monsters that have come to be known as Romero zombies.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times chided theater owners and parents who allowed children access to the film. "I don't think the younger kids really knew what hit them," complained Ebert. "They were used to going to movies, sure, and they'd seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else." According to Ebert, the film affected the audience immediately:

The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.

Romero's reinvention of zombies is notable in terms of its thematics; he used zombies not just for their own sake, but as a vehicle "to criticize real-world social ills—such as government ineptitude, bioengineering, slavery, greed and exploitation—while indulging our post-apocalyptic fantasies". Night was the first of six films in Romero's Living Dead series. Its first sequel, Dawn of the Dead, was released in 1978.

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Movie poster for the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead

Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 was released just months after Dawn of the Dead and acted as an unofficial sequel (Dawn of the Dead was released in several other countries as Zombi or Zombie) Despite the popular belief that it was made in order to cash in on Dawn's success, the two films were shot at the same time, and the title change was made at the last minute.

The early 1980s was notable for the introduction of zombies into Chinese and other Asian films, often martial arts/horror crossover films, that featured zombies as thralls animated by magic for purposes of battle. Though the idea never had large enough appeal to become a sub-genre, zombies are still used as martial-arts villains in some films today.

The 1981 film Hell of the Living Dead referenced a mutagenic gas as a source of zombie contagion, an idea also used in Dan O'Bannon's 1985 film Return of the Living Dead. Return of the Living Dead featured zombies which hungered specifically for brains instead of all human flesh.

The mid-1980s produced few zombie films of note. Perhaps the most notable entry, The Evil Dead series, while highly influential are not technically zombie films but films about demonic possession, despite the presence of the undead. 1985's Re-Animator, loosely based on the Lovecraft story, stood out in the genre, achieving nearly unanimous critical acclaim, and becoming a modest success, nearly outstripping Romero's Day of the Dead for box office returns.

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.). Several years later, zombies experienced a renaissance in low-budget Asian cinema, with a sudden spate of dissimilar entries including Bio Zombie (1998), Wild Zero (1999), Junk (1999), Versus (2000) and Stacy (2001).

The turn of the millennium coincided with a decade of box office successes in which the zombie sub-genre experienced a resurgence: the Resident Evil movies (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2012); the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004), the British films 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later (2002, 2007) and the comedy/homage Shaun of the Dead (2004). The new interest allowed Romero to create the fourth entry in his zombie series: Land of the Dead, released in the summer of 2005. Romero returned to the series with the films Diary of the Dead (2008) and Survival of the Dead (2010).

Generally the zombies in these situations are the slow, lumbering and unintelligent kind first made popular in Night of the Living Dead. Motion pictures created within the 2000s, however, like the Dawn of the Dead remake, and House of the Dead, have featured zombies that are more agile, vicious, intelligent, and stronger than the traditional zombie. In many cases, "fast" zombies are depicted as living humans infected with a mind-altering pathogen, making them more commonly known as the Infected (as in 28 Days Later, Zombieland and Left 4 Dead)—instead of re-animated corpses—to avoid the "slow death walk" of Romero's variety of zombies.

The name "zombie"

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Tor Johnson as a zombie with his victim in cult movie Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

How these creatures came to be called "zombies" is not fully clear. The film Night of the Living Dead made no spoken reference to its undead antagonists as "zombies", describing them instead as "ghouls", though this is inaccurate if compared to the original "ghoul" of Arabic folklore. Although George Romero used the term "ghoul" in his original scripts, in later interviews he used the term "zombie" without explanation. The word "zombie" is used exclusively by Romero in his 1978 script for his sequel Dawn of the Dead, including once in dialog. This "retroactively fits [the creatures] with an invisible Haitian/African prehistory, formally introducing the zombie as a new archetype".Template:Citation broken It has been argued however that the name is not truly applicable to these creatures because the zombie of Haitian Vodun is not a raging monster, but a passive victim.

One of the first books to expose Western culture to the concept of the Vodun zombie was The Magic Island by W.B. Seabrook in 1929. Island is the sensationalized account of a narrator in Haiti who encounters voodoo cults and their resurrected thralls. Time claimed that the book "introduced 'zombi' into U.S. speech".

In 1932, Victor Halperin directed White Zombie, a horror film starring Bela Lugosi. This film, capitalizing on the same voodoo zombie themes as Seabrook's book of three years prior, is often regarded as the first legitimate zombie film ever made. Here zombies are depicted as mindless, unthinking henchmen under the spell of an evil magician. Zombies, often still using this voodoo-inspired rationale, were initially uncommon in cinema, but their appearances continued sporadically through the 1930s to the 1960s, with notable films including I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).

In his article, "The Evolution of the Zombie: the Monster That Keeps Coming Back", Shawn McIntosh notes that, "even after the traditional zombie largely disappeared from the screen, there was still a strong fascination with the word", and that "zombie" came to be applied to a wide variety of disfigured or deformed creatures throughout the 50s and 60s. However, even as they began to take on the shabbier, corpse-like characteristics of later "zombies", these creatures always followed the Voodoo convention of being controlled by a master.

Zombie apocalypse

Main article: Zombie apocalypse

Intimately tied to the conception of the modern zombie is the "zombie apocalypse"; the breakdown of society as a result of an initial zombie outbreak which spreads. This archetype has emerged as a prolific subgenre of apocalyptic fiction and been portrayed in countless zombie-related media post-Night. Early media references to the term "zombie apocalypse" include an October, 2008 Dread Central blog previewing the then in-development 2009 film Zombieland, which did include the term in its dialog, as well as an earlier April 2008 Wired blog unrelated to the film. In a zombie apocalypse, a widespread (usually global) rise of zombies hostile to human life engages in a general assault on civilization. Victims of zombies may become zombies themselves. This causes the outbreak to become an exponentially growing crisis: the spreading "zombie plague/virus" swamps normal military and law enforcement organizations, leading to the panicked collapse of civilian society until only isolated pockets of survivors remain, scavenging for food and supplies in a world reduced to a pre-industrial hostile wilderness.

In art

Artist Jillian McDonald has made several works of video art involving zombies, and exhibited them in her 2006 show, “Horror Make-Up,” which debuted on 8 September 2006 at Art Moving Projects, a gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Others have included “Zombie Loop” and “Zombie Portraits”.

Artist Karim Charredib has dedicated his work to the zombie figure. In 2007, he made a video installation at villa Savoye called "Them !!!" where zombies walked in the villa like tourists. He has also made a series of collages, inserting zombies in the background of famous movies, such as North by Northwest, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gone With The Wind and Casablanca.

In comics

Robert Kirkman, an admirer of Romero, launched a self-published comic book The Walking Dead, and wrote Marvel Zombies in 2006. DC Comics' Geoff Johns introduced a revenant-staffed Black Lantern Corps, consisting of the maliciously animated corpses of fallen DC metahumans during its "Blackest Night" story arc.

DC Comics continued producing zombie comics on their digital imprint Zuda Comics. The Black Cherry Bombshells takes place in a world of all where all the men have turned into zombies and women gangs fight with them and each other.

In 1973, Marvel Comics launched a black and white magazine series entitled Tales of the Zombie featuring the adventures of Simon William Garth aka the Zombie. After the series ended in 1975, the character was resurrected in 1993 and has appeared a few times in Spider-Man-related comic book series. From 2005, Marvel Comics used zombies and the zombie apocalypse scenario as the focus of their series Marvel Zombies, in which the superheroes of the Marvel Universe were transformed into zombies.

In gaming

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Player characters battling enemy zombies from Konami's Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin

See also: List of zombie video games and Survival horror

Zombies are a popular theme for video games, particularly of, but not limited to, the survival horror, first-person shooter and role-playing game genres. Some important titles in this area include the Resident Evil series, Silent Hill series, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, Dead Rising (and its sequel Dead Rising 2), House of the Dead, Left 4 Dead and the Nazi Zombie game modes from Call of Duty: World at War, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Black Ops II. PopCap Games Plants vs. Zombies, a humorous tower defense game, was an indie hit in 2009, featuring in several best-of lists at the end of that year. The massively multiplayer online role-playing game Urban Dead, a free grid-based browser game where zombies and survivors fight for control of a ruined city, is one of the most popular games of its type, with an estimated 30,680 visits per day. Some games even allow the gamer to play as a zombie. In the game Stubbs the Zombie in "Rebel Without a Pulse", zombies are impervious to most attacks, except trauma to the head (which would instantly "kill" the zombie). The game Left 4 Dead and its sequel Left 4 Dead 2 pit two teams against each other, one team consists of humans attempting to make it to a safe room while the other team consists of "specialized" zombies attempting to stop them. Early platforms to feature zombie games included the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, which featured a game entitled Zombies Ate My Neighbors that was produced in 1993.

Outside of video games, zombies frequently appear in trading card games such as Magic: The Gathering, as well as in role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop wargames such as Warhammer Fantasy and 40K. The RPG All Flesh Must Be Eaten is premised upon a zombie outbreak and features rules for zombie campaigns in many historical settings. The online game Minecraft has a common enemy zombie, which chases and/or kills you.

The award-winning Zombies!!! series of board games by Twilight Creations features players attempting to escape from a zombie-infested city. Cheapass Games has released five other zombie-themed games, including Give Me the Brain, The Great Brain Robbery, and Lord of the Fries, which takes place at Friedey's, a fast-food restaurant staffed by minimum wage zombies. Last Night on Earth is a boardgame covering many stereotypes of the zombie movie genre.

The game Humans vs. Zombies is a popular zombie-themed live-action game played on many college campuses. The game starts with one "Zombie" and a group of "Humans." The ultimate goal of the game is for either all Humans to be turned into Zombies, or for the humans to survive a set amount of time. Humans defend themselves using socks or dart guns, stunning the Zombie players; Zombies are unarmed and must tag a Human in order to turn him or her into a Zombie. Safe zones are established so that players can eat, sleep and go to class in safety.

In merchandise

Many companies from around the world have also put strong focus on creating products geared towards the 'zombie' culture. This list includes Kittiwat Unarrom, an artist in Thailand, that bakes/glazes breads to look like human body parts; a company in California, Harcos Labs, that sells bagged Zombie Blood and Zombie Jerky in specimen style pouches; and an array of small companies creating novelty products such as Zombie Mints (which taste like "rotting brains"), Screaming Zombie Energy Drink, and Gummy Brains. These items have been incorporated into cosplay during zombie walks around the world. The ammunition manufacturer Hornady announced a line of ammunition dubbed "Zombie Max" purportedly for use on zombies. The ammunition features a green ballistic tip and stylized packaging.

In music

Zombies and horror have become so popular that many songs and bands have been based on these flesh-eating ghouls; most notably the musician Roky Erickson whose post 13th Floor Elevators music based on zombie and other horror themes was profoundly influential on later musicians such as Rob Zombie, who has incorporated zombie aesthetics and references into virtually all of his work. Zombie references crop up in every genre from pop to death metal and some subgenres such as horror punk mine the zombie aesthetic extensively. Horror punk has also been linked with the subgenres of deathrock and psychobilly. The success of these genres has been mainly underground, although psychobilly has reached some mainstream popularity.

Producers have acquired the rights to Michael Jackson's Thriller for a proposed Broadway musical, "complete with dancing undead."

The song "Re: Your Brains" by Jonathan Coulton is a song from the perspective of an office employee turned zombie. It can be found in the Easter-egg-style jukeboxes in the game Left 4 Dead 2.

American underground rapper Aesop Rock became a zombie in the video for his single "Coffee".

American metalcore band The Devil Wears Prada base the lyrics on their Zombie EP documenting a zombie apocalypse.

Send More Paramedics were a horror film-influenced crossover thrash band from Leeds in the north of England. The band played in the 1980s crossover style, what they described as "Zombiecore...a fusion of 80s thrash and modern hardcore punk", with lyrics about zombies and cannibalism, and were heavily influenced by zombie movies.

In print and literature

See also: List of zombie novels

In the 1990s, zombie fiction emerged as a distinct literary subgenre, with the publication of Book of the Dead in 1990 and its follow-up Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2 in 1992, both edited by horror authors John Skipp and Craig Spector. Featuring Romero-inspired stories from the likes of Stephen King and other famous names, the Book of the Dead compilations are regarded as influential in the horror genre and perhaps the first true "zombie literature".

Recent zombie fiction of note includes Brian Keene's 2005 novel The Rising, followed by its sequel City of the Dead, which deal with a worldwide apocalypse of intelligent zombies, caused by demonic possession. Though the story took many liberties with the zombie concept, The Rising proved itself to be a success in the subgenre, even winning the 2005 Bram Stoker award.

Famed horror novelist Stephen King has mined the zombie theme, first with 1990's "Home Delivery", written for the aforementioned Book of the Dead compilation and detailing a small town's attempt to defend itself from a classic zombie outbreak. In 2006 King published 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, created by "The Pulse", a global electromagnetic phenomenon that turns the world's cellular phone users into bloodthirsty, zombie-like maniacs. Cell was a number-one bestseller upon its release

Aside from Cell, the most well-known current work of zombie fiction is 2006's World War Z by Max Brooks, which was an immediate hit upon its release and a New York Times bestseller. Brooks had previously authored the cult hit The Zombie Survival Guide, an exhaustively researched, zombie-themed parody of pop-fiction survival guides published in 2003. Brooks has said that zombies are so popular because:

Other monsters may threaten individual humans, but the living dead threaten the entire human race.... Zombies are slate wipers.

David Wellington's trilogy of zombie novels began in 2004 with Monster Island, followed by two sequels, Monster Nation and Monster Planet. The Monster Trilogy reveals the flesh-eating urge of the zombie is caused by a desire for life force, a golden energy that is found in living organisms. When pushed, Wellington's zombies will even consume plant matter. The reader is informed of this golden energy via the accounts of Liches, individuals who have voluntarily or involuntarily managed to maintain the flow of oxygen to the brain during death and emerge 'zombified' yet intelligent.

Jonathan Maberry's Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead, released in August 2008, interviewed over 250 experts in forensics, medicine, science, law enforcement, the military and similar disciplines to discuss how the real world would react, research and respond to zombies. Maberry has also created a new series, the first being Rot and Ruin, a continuation of a short story he wrote in the anthology The New Dead. Rot and Ruin is succeeded by Dust and Decay.

By 2009, zombies became all the rage in literature:

In the world of traditional horror, nothing is more popular right now than zombies.... The living dead are here to stay.

—Katy Hershbereger, St. Martin's Press

The 2009 mashup novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith combines the full text of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen with a story about a zombie epidemic within the novel's British Regency period setting.

In television and video

One of the most famous zombie-themed television appearances was 1983's Thriller, a Michael Jackson music video featuring choreographed zombies dancing with the singer. Many pop culture media have paid tribute to this scene alone, including zombie films such as Return of the Living Dead 2.

Romero-styled zombie outbreaks are often featured in animated shows, such as in the Halloween episodes of The Simpsons, South Park, and Invader Zim. In Japan, zombies often appear in manga and anime, such as Highschool of the Dead, Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpucho and Zombie-Loan.

In 2008, writer Charlie Brooker created Dead Set, a television miniseries set in a zombie apocalypse. The satirical horror storyline follows fictional contestants of the British Big Brother series, along with the studio employees who are trapped inside the Big Brother house as wild, savage zombies rampage outside.

In 2010, director Frank Darabont launched The Walking Dead, based on the graphic novel, on US network AMC. It has since become the highest rated show in the history of that network and gone on to win two Saturn Awards for best dramatic presentation.

In August 2011, MTV premiered Death Valley, a spoof horror series about an "Undead Task Force" that capture various monsters, including zombies, that infest San Fernando Valley.

Social activism

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A Zombie Walk in Pittsburgh

Main articles: Zombie walk and Zombie Squad

Some zombie fans continue the George A. Romero tradition of using zombies as a social commentary. Organized zombie walks, which are primarily promoted through word of mouth, are regularly staged in some countries. Usually they are arranged as a sort of surrealist performance art, but they are occasionally organized as part of a political protest.

See also

• Apocalypticism
• Doomsday film
• Vampire fiction

References

Template:Bareurls

External links

• Columbia College (Chicago)'s university course on zombies