Have we not all at one time or another felt like a zombie? We work ourselves into a mindless blob of humanity.
My last blog was on vampires, so I thought I would give equal time to zombies. It is true that in the American media that zombies regularly appear, especially in so-called “troubled times.” For example, Night of the Living Dead (1968) came along during the Vietnam era. Zombies are an unfinished portrait of what scares us, and they reflect the crisis of the moment.
As this is an election year, let us look at the political ramifications of zombie movies. I read an article a few years back, which claimed we are polluted with zombie movies when a Republican is in office and with vampire movies when a Democrat takes over. The idea is that Democrats are afraid of upper class America and believe the rich are milking the country dry, and the Republicans fear a revolt of the masses. If one looks at it that way, it makes sense that when the first Bush was in office that we had 183 zombie flicks in seven years. During the Clinton years we were given Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Blade, Interview with a Vampire, Bram Stroker’s Dracula, etc.
Where vampire films are often the metaphor for any misunderstood minority (gays and lesbians, etc.), zombies are used as an analogy for society’s bigger ideas (the Cold War, disease, pollution, etc.). They reflect our greatest fear at the time. Zombies are virtually “unkillable,” are biodegradable, possess a perverse single-mindedness, have no supernatural powers, and are “lovingly” hideous. They are the monsters of the people!
In modern times, the term “zombie” has been applied to an undead being in horror fiction, often drawing from the depiction of zombies in George A. Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. They have appeared as plot devices in various books, films, television shows, video games and comics.
In Popular Culture
The figure of the zombie has appeared several times in fantasy themed fiction and entertainment, as early as the 1929 novel The Magic Island by William Seabrook. 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, and introduced the word “zombie” to the wider world. Other zombie-themed films include Val Lewton’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, (1988) a heavily fictionalized account of Wade Davis’ book.
The DC comics character Solomon Grundy, a villain who first appeared in a 1944 Green Lantern story, is one of the earliest depictions of a zombie in the comics medium. In 2011, Image Comics released a four issue miniseries entitled Drums, by writer El Torres and artist Abe Hernando. The story consists of Afro-Caribbean zombies that have been created using voodoo.
The zombie also appears as a metaphor in protest songs, symbolizing mindless adherence to authority, particularly in law enforcement and the armed forces. Well-known examples include Fela Kuti’s 1976 album Zombie, and The Cranberries’ 1994 single “Zombie.”
A new version of the zombie, distinct from that described in Haitian religion, has also emerged in popular culture in recent decades. This “zombie” is taken largely from George A. Romero’s seminal film The Night of the Living Dead, which was in turn partly inspired by Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend. The word zombie is not used in Night of the Living Dead, but was applied later by fans. The monsters in the film and its sequels, such as Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, as well as its many inspired works, such as Return of the Living Dead and Zombi 2, are usually hungry for human flesh although Return of the Living Dead introduced the popular concept of zombies eating brains.
Sometimes they are victims of a fictional pandemic illness causing the dead to reanimate or the living to behave this way, but often no cause is given in the story. Although this modern monster bears some superficial resemblance to the Haitian zombie tradition, its links to such folklore are unclear, and many consider George A. Romero to be the progenitor of this creature.
Zombie fiction is now a sizeable sub-genre of horror, usually describing a breakdown of civilization occurring when most of the population become flesh-eating zombies — a zombie apocalypse.
Zombiepedia tells us, “Zombies are an extremely popular theme for video games, particularly in first-person shooters and role-playing genres. The most popular games in the theme include Resident Evil, Dead Rising, House of the Dead, and Left 4 Dead. Outside of console games, the 3D multiplayer online game, Dead Frontier, features survivors battling against zombies and mutants, and has over 2,000 players online every minute. Another zombie MMO is grid-based gamed Urban Dead, where players battle the undead. The Last Stand is also an online game and currently has four installments.
In Music: “Zombies and horror have become so popular that many songs and bands have been based on these flesh-eating zombies. 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. the well known metal musician (and director) Rob Zombie incorporates zombie aesthetics and references into much of his music and music videos. As well, the zombie also appears in protest songs, symbolizing mindless adherence to authority (especially in law enforcement and the armed forces.) A well-known example is Fela Kuti’s 1976 single Zombie. Likewise, The Cranberries hit single “Zombie” uses them as metaphors for the cultlike perpetrators of continued Irish violence centered around independence movements and religious divisions. Don’t forget Micheal Jackson’s famous Thriller where his back up dancers were dressed in frightening zombie costumes in the graveyard themed video.”
In Art: “Artist Jillian has made several works of video art involving zombies, and exhibited them in her 2007 show, “Horror Stories,” at ThreeWalls Gallery in Chicago. Other zombie-related works by McDonald include “Zombies in Condoland” (prints and animations derived from internet documentation of zombie walks), and a series of lenticular animation photographs called “Zombie Portraits,” in which the subjects transform into zombies.”
In 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.
“David Wellington’s trilogy of zombie novels began in 2004 with Monster Island, followed by two sequels, Monster Nation and Monster Planet. These were serialised in a weblog format before being published in paperback.
“The fictional Disney cartoon character Bombie the Zombie, created by Carl Barks, first appeared in the Voodoo Hoodoo strip in 1949. Bombie had been reanimated by an African voodoo sorcerer, and was sent on a mission to poison Scrooge McDuck. Later on Don Rosa reused the character in his own McDuck stories.
“J.K. Rowling includes zombies, known as Inferi, in the sixth book of her Harry Potter series. The Inferi are dead humans who are re-animated by Dark Magic.”
Other Sources You Might Find Interesting:
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