Creature Feature – A Monster Countdown to Halloween #1: Zombies

Well, we were always going to start with one of the classics, weren’t we? The tour guide at the Natural History Museum doesn’t kick things off by showing you where the air conditioning units are unless it’s five minutes to kicking out time and he hates you.

No, we’re starting strong with one of the horror all-timers, the zombie. Everyone thinks they’d survive a zombie apocalypse – a George A. Romero slow zombie version, at the very least – but most of those people are going to wind up stuck between what’s left of their neighbour’s front teeth, no matter how many mall katanas they have on display. The lumbering, decaying hordes of the living dead are as relentless and inexorable as the tides of the sea and no matter what distance you put between you and them, you’ll run out of bullets before they run out of footsteps.

But what is a zombie, and where did it come from? We’re all more than aware of the modern interpretation of the mindless hordes of the undead; you can throw a rock in any direction and hit at least two seasons of The Walking Dead and a flash game with zombies in it. But we’ve got to go back a lot further to explore the true origins of it all. There are mentions of creatures that could be interpreted as zombies as far back as Ancient Mesopotamia, referenced in texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh (literally the oldest surviving notable literature, which means zombies were possibly cliché a lot earlier than you might think). The ancient goddess Inanna, who you may know better as Ishtar, threatened to kick down doors and raise the dead to mess up her enemies, which puts the idea of the living dead on record at least four thousand years ago.

There’s a huge time jump between the first few smatterings of the notion of a zombie, though, and the zombies that would go on to inspire the creators of the 20th century and beyond. 16th and 17th century Haiti, under French rule at the time and mired in the atrocity of the slave trade, gave rise to a new form of zombie – a slave, imprisoned in a body after death that didn’t truly belong to them but was theirs physically all the same, trapped on the very plantations they had been forced to work for eternity. This was reportedly believed to be the fate of slaves who took their own lives rather than be forced to perform the bidding of others. Zombies remained a large part of Haitian folklore after this, long into the 18th and 19th centuries where the idea of a zombie shifted into that of a “Voodoo zombie” – that being a person who was raised from the dead utilizing magic, witchcraft or voodoo. The result was a tragic reflection of the Hattian zombie roots, though – often the zombies were claimed to be resurrected to do the hard labour and work of those who had returned them from the dead. These sorts of zombies were hugely influential in the creation of the zombies of the mid-20th century, which we’ll get to in a few paragraphs.

At the turn of the 19th century, the idea of magic being involved in the creation and harnessing of the walking dead started to make way for more scientific interpretations. Frankenstein, the tragic tale of the world’s first Ultimate Bodybuilder, could easily be interpreted as a forerunner of a modern zombie story, albeit one where lots of dead people made one zombie rather than the other way around. It would be another hundred or so years after that before zombies started to mass, though.

From the 1920s to the 1960s, more and more zombies began popping up as the core of works of media. Famously, HP Lovecraft played with the idea of the undead quite thoroughly in several of his works, the most pointed example of zombies appearing in “Herbert West – Reanimator”, a tale of a mad scientist using, well, mad science, to raise the dead for his whims in 1921. This was one of the first “zombie stories” to play on the more animalistic nature of the zombie we know now – zombies before then had typically been a docile, haunted breed rather than the unstoppable savages of the modern day. 1929 novel The Magic Island introduced the Haitian version of events to the rest of the world, followed by the heavily inspired 1932 film The White Zombie, both versions taking a rare step back on the trip to the science-fuelled zombie of the far-flung future.

All of this history would eventually culminate in what was to be the definitive dawn, pun fully intended, of the most well-regurgitated but undeniably definitive version of the zombie mythos. 1968 saw Night of the Living Dead not only scare the shit out of thousands of people who paid for the privilege to see it but the arrival of the form of the zombie most commonly seen today – the mindless people eaters, moving in hordes and acting on pure, base impulse. The low-budget groundbreaker skyrocketed the popularity of the zombie (the story of the film itself being an incredibly well-written reflection and commentary of the raging Civil Rights movement at the time is a story for another article we’ll get to) and its sequels – most specifically Dawn of the Dead in 1978 and Day of the Dead in 1985 – are milestones of zombie culture to this day. There’s not a zombie film made or book written since 1968 that doesn’t in some way owe a tip of the hat or a solid bootlick to the work that George A. Romero and his teams did in making the modern zombie such a terrifying force of nature.

This was the turning point of the zombie story from its Haitian origins into the realm of science and the trend continues. Viruses became the go-to way of explaining how a zombie came about, especially when video games picked up on the terrifying idea of the creatures in the 1990s. Resident Evil proved to be the biggest and most influential, playing with ideas of an apocalypse created by an extremely contagious virus in a series that over thirty years later is still playing with zombies (and trying to not strangle itself to death on its own plotlines). The idea of a virus, or at least some implied scientific failure has become the central theme of many zombie outbreaks – from the comedy horror stylings of Shaun of the Dead to the gritty realism of 28 Days Later, from the wave of Asian zombie horrors like Train to Busan to, of course, the unstoppable zombie of a TV show The Walking Dead. And that’s about where we are now – it’s fair to say that zombies as a theme have died off a little in the last few years, but we all know that even death doesn’t stop these things, so waning popularity won’t even knock off a rotted arm.

So, there you have it, a not-too-brief history of the zombie, from its very beginnings to where we find ourselves today. We hope you had fun, learned something new or, at the very least, popped round to your neighbour’s house and made sure all of his katanas could at least cut through a plastic water bottle. We’ll leave this with you until tomorrow’s Creature Feature – where things will be getting much more nautical.

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