The Zombie

Where it comes from

In Haitian folklore, a zombie is a dead body brought back by magic and made to serve. The sorcerer who does this is called a bokor, and he is opposed in the tradition by houngan and mambo, the male and female priests of Vodou. The zombie has no will of its own and works for its master. A second idea, the zombie astral, treats the zombie as part of a person's soul that can be captured and kept in a bottle. The tradition grew from beliefs brought by enslaved Africans, and the writer Amy Wilentz argues that slavery shaped the concept strongly, noting that fear of zombification was used to discourage suicide among the enslaved.

The word itself has a disputed ancestry. The Oxford English Dictionary traces it through French and a French Creole to the Kimbundu word nzumbi, meaning ghost or spirit, and scholars also point to the Kongo words nzambi, meaning god, and zumbi. The creature that most people now picture, a dead body that rises and hunts the living in groups, is a different thing. It came from American cinema of the 1960s, and its main author was George A. Romero.

On screen

The zombie has had two lives on screen. The first was Haitian: a victim, often a woman, enslaved by a villain with supernatural powers. The second was Romero's: a mass of reanimated corpses, ruled by hunger, with the survivors forming the real drama. The two lives overlap in the early films and then separate sharply after 1968.

In the library, the entry film is Night of the Living Dead, which never uses the word zombie, and its director has a page of his own: George A. Romero. The wider subgenre is covered under zombie and apocalyptic horror.

Common traits

• A body that keeps moving after death, with little or no memory or personality.
• Hunger, usually for living flesh, in the Romero tradition; one 1985 comedy added a craving for brains.
• Spread by a bite or by a fast-moving infection, a rule that varies from film to film.
• Destroying the brain is the usual way to stop one, although in the 1968 film fire also repels them.
• Slow and relentless in the classic version, and sprinting in the films influenced by video games and the 2002 film 28 Days Later.

Haiti and the first books

Western audiences learned about zombies during the U.S. occupation of Haiti, from 1915 to 1934, which brought international attention to alleged cases. William Seabrook's travel book The Magic Island (1929) was among the first popular accounts, and it is reported to have introduced the word zombi into American speech. The book described the creatures as workers in the fields, which fit a longstanding fear that a person could be reduced to labor without freedom.

In 1937 the anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston investigated a case in Haiti in which a woman was claimed to be a relative who had died in 1907. X-rays did not match the dead relative's known injury. Later, in the 1980s, the Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis argued in The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and Passage of Darkness (1988) that zombification might involve powders containing tetrodotoxin, a pufferfish poison, along with plant drugs such as datura. Critics, among them the psychologist Terence Hines, found this overly credulous, noting that tetrodotoxin poisoning does not produce a long trance. In 1997, Roland Littlewood suggested in The Lancet that many reported zombies were mentally ill strangers mistaken for lost relatives.

White Zombie and the 1930s and 1940s

The first feature-length zombie film is generally taken to be White Zombie, directed by Victor Halperin and released on July 28, 1932. Bela Lugosi plays Murder Legendre, a Haitian sugar mill owner and sorcerer who turns people into servants, and Madge Bellamy plays the young woman he targets. The screenplay by Garnett Weston was loosely based on Seabrook's book. The budget was about $50,000, it was shot in eleven days in March 1932, and much of it was filmed on the Universal lot, where sets from earlier horror films were reused. Reviews on release were mostly negative, though Lugosi was praised; modern critics are more favorable and often single out its atmosphere.

The idea stayed in the Haitian mode for decades. Revolt of the Zombies (1936) was a loose follow-up. I Walked with a Zombie (1943) was an early, serious treatment of the legend. In all these films the zombie is a tool in somebody's hands, a figure of dominated labor, and the horror is tied to the villain's will.

Night of the Living Dead

Romero changed everything. With John Russo and Russell Streiner, he ran The Latent Image, a Pittsburgh commercial production company, and the three formed Image Ten to make a feature. They filmed from July 1967 to January 1968 near Evans City, Pennsylvania, rented a condemned farmhouse because they could not afford a set, and shot in black and white. The budget is given as roughly $100,000 to $125,000. The film premiered in Pittsburgh on October 1, 1968, shortly before the MPAA rating system began.

Romero has said that one source was Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend, and the film's creatures are called ghouls, never zombies. A title change, from Night of the Flesh Eaters, led to the accidental loss of the copyright notice, which put the film in the public domain and made it easy for others to copy. Duane Jones played the lead, Ben; Romero has said the part was not written with a Black actor in mind and that Jones was cast for his audition. Critics have read the film in connection with 1960s American society, Cold War fears and racism, and Robin Wood read the cannibalism as a critique of capitalism. The Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry in 1999.

Romero's sequels and the Italian wave

Dawn of the Dead (1978) was set largely in a shopping mall and became the most commercially successful zombie film for decades. It is the first of Romero's scripts to use the word zombie for his creatures. Day of the Dead (1985) closed the original trilogy. Across the Atlantic, Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (1979) was released as an ersatz sequel, one of several Italian films that drew on Romero's success. The film business was learning that the undead were cheap to stage and easy to sell.

Return of the Living Dead (1985), written and directed by Dan O'Bannon, treated the whole idea as black comedy and introduced zombies who crave brains; the line is so familiar now that few people realize it began in this film. Literary sources continued to feed the cycle. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) set up the idea of reanimation as science, H. P. Lovecraft's Herbert West stories, written in 1921 and 1922, gave readers mute, violent resurrected bodies, and EC Comics in the early 1950s offered avenging corpses that Romero later cited.

Fast zombies, games and the 2000s

The late 1990s revived the type through video games. Capcom's Resident Evil and Sega's The House of the Dead, both from 1996, popularized zombie games, and the second introduced running zombies. Their influence reached film. 28 Days Later (2002) popularized the fast zombie, strictly an infected human, in cinemas, and the Resident Evil film series, which began in 2002, grossed over a billion dollars by 2011. In 2004 the remake of Dawn of the Dead and the British comedy Shaun of the Dead arrived within months of each other.

Television and fiction followed. Max Brooks's novel World War Z (2006) became a bestseller, and its 2013 film version became the highest-grossing zombie film. The Walking Dead premiered in 2010 and, by 2013, was reported to have drawn the highest U.S. ratings of any broadcast or cable series among viewers aged 18 to 49. At the same time, the horror market was moving away from the slow, shuffling dead and toward infection stories where speed and numbers drive the plot.

Zombies around the world

In Asia the zombie has found its own forms. Hong Kong's jiangshi films, popularized by Mr. Vampire (1985), made a major wave in the 1980s; the Chinese reanimated corpse sits between vampire and zombie, which is why the creature is discussed in the entry on the vampire too. The video games of the late 1990s helped spark a revival of zombie films in Asia. South Korea's Train to Busan (2016) became a worldwide hit and led to a series, and Alive (2020) and the television drama All of Us Are Dead (2022) followed. The Japanese comedy One Cut of the Dead (2017) became a sleeper hit.

Not every example is bleak. Warm Bodies (2013) and the television series iZombie portrayed zombies as sympathetic, which some commentators read as a metaphor for marginalized groups asking for equality. A Western decline in zombie films in the late 2010s did not end the form; it moved to other media and countries, as horror often does.

What the zombie means

The Haitian zombie carried a social meaning of its own: unfreedom, labor and the fear of losing the self. Romero's version carried a different one. He used zombies to criticize government incompetence, consumerism, greed and exploitation, and the genre's apocalyptic setting suggests that civilization is fragile. In Dawn of the Dead the mall, with its shoppers drifting from shop to shop, makes the point without comment.

The creature works as a mirror because it has no politics of its own. Writers can aim it at plague, war, class, or the news cycle. That blankness is also what separates it from its cousins: it lacks the vampire's voice, the ghost's grievance (compare the onryo, whose resentment drives everything), and the monster's purpose. The viewer's attention falls instead on the living, which is why the best zombie stories are mainly about how people treat each other under pressure.

How to explore it in the library

Start with Night of the Living Dead, and read the Romero entry for the rest of his work. Then use the zombie apocalyptic subgenre page to see how the story spread. Because the 1968 film is in the public domain, it is easy to find, and its low-budget look is part of the effect.

For a different relationship between the dead and the living, turn to Ringu, where a ghost acts with intent and not by appetite. And for the monster that predates the cinema entirely, read about the vampire, which shares the zombie's themes of infection, transformation and the fear of becoming something else. Seen together, the two show how horror turns the same fear of death and contagion into very different creatures.

Verified details

• In Haitian folklore a zombie is controlled by a bokor, a sorcerer opposed by Vodou priests.
• William Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929) brought the word to American readers.
• White Zombie (1932) was shot in eleven days on a budget of about $50,000.
• Night of the Living Dead premiered in Pittsburgh on October 1, 1968, and never uses the word zombie.
• The Library of Congress added Night of the Living Dead to the National Film Registry in 1999.
• Dawn of the Dead (1978) was set mostly in a shopping mall and was the most commercially successful zombie film for decades.
• Return of the Living Dead (1985) introduced the idea that zombies crave brains.
• Capcom's Resident Evil and Sega's The House of the Dead both appeared in 1996.
• 28 Days Later (2002) popularized the fast zombie in film.
• Max Brooks's World War Z appeared in 2006, and The Walking Dead premiered in 2010.

Sources and further reading

• Zombie, Wikipedia
• Zombie film, Wikipedia
• White Zombie (film), Wikipedia
• Night of the Living Dead, Wikipedia
• J-horror, Wikipedia