The History of Zombies

One of the reasons why zombies have become such timeless movie monsters is the fact that the entire concept is so incredibly simple. You have to get bitten by a vampire bat and go all goth to turn into Dracula, and becoming Frankenstein involves some bad luck and a lightning storm. But the primal fear that death may not be as final as we originally thought doesn't require the same kind of suspension of disbelief as Brendan Fraser fighting a Sand Mummy. Zombies strike so much fear because they're so deceptively simple, and the 28 movies, in particular, play off that idea that zombies (or the Crazies, if you prefer that term) could be anyone. Your friends, your mom, the guy next door. Hell, they could even be you.

The Crazies in the 28 movies may not be traditional zombies -- it's more of a virus that fills living humans with unlimited rage and a taste for flesh -- but they still tap into that same primal zombie fear of the "dangerous other." The horror movie genre is often the best barometer of our fears as a nation, and zombies have always been most popular in America when, as a country, we're most scared of an enemy who looks just like us yet doesn't have the same moral code. Zombies became huge in American pop culture during both the Cold and Vietnam Wars, when it wasn't such a stretch to go from Commie to Zombie. It's equally easy to jump from terrorist to walking dead, which could explain the current zombie resurgence in US culture. Granted, a lot of the renewed popularity is the result of some very talented filmmakers, like Edgar Wright and Danny Boyle, exploring the zombie world, but it doesn't hurt that Americans are currently more paranoid than ever, ready to board up our windows and grab a shotgun at a moment's notice. Just as growth in female sexuality drove the vampire mythology and a new crop of serial killers drove the slasher genre of the late '70s and '80s, it's when we truly fear the people around us that zombies start coming back from the dead.

Of course, zombies and Crazies go back much further than the Cold War, and some might even tell you that they have basis in fact, so let's start with a little zombie refresher course before we get to the heights of zombie-mania in fiction and film. Many people will tell you that zombies and reanimation of dead tissue extends back to the origins of Voodoo and Afro-Caribbean beliefs. The story goes that the "Ti Bon Ange" (or the soul) can be stolen from a body, creating a lifeless, brain-dead slave. At first, in most pop culture, that's all that zombies were, but horror and supernatural fiction slowly evolved the concept into something far more sinister. Suddenly, zombies weren't just brain-dead slaves, they were brain-hungry villains. There have been alleged "true stories" of zombies throughout history, including the adventures of Wade Davis, a doctor made famous in The Serpent and the Rainbow for investigating zombie practices in Haiti in the early '80s, but there are also "true stories" of vampires and Bigfoot, so it really all comes down to what you're willing to label as "true."

In American pop culture, zombies go back to the days of H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote stories about the totally insane Dr. Herbert West, made popular in present day by the Stuart Gordon movie, Re-Animator. In Lovecraft's fiction, West would try to revive human tissue with zombie-like results. Even earlier than that, there are references to brain-dead men walking the earth as early as 1697, in a French novel called The Zombie of the Great Peru. In a French dictionary a hundred years later, the word would be used again in reference to Haiti, mentioning that floods in the area would sometimes bring buried bodies back to the surface, probably influencing the idea that the dead were returning to life.

The first landmark in the modern history of zombies in pop culture came in 1954 with the publication of I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. Legend is about a lone man in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles that has been overrun by bloodsucking ghouls. They're not your traditional or even your modern zombies, but Legend had a huge influence on the way zombie culture would transform over the next half-century for two main reasons. First, Legend inspired the President of Zombie-dom, George A. Romero, to make the most famous zombie film of all time, Night of the Living Dead, and second, it set up a structure that would be copied by zombie movies from then on -- a small group of people, sometime only one man, trapped in one place, surrounded by a sea of the undead. I Am Legend solidified the theme of "the evil of the world outside the home" that zombie movies would make their own for the next five decades and counting.

As mentioned, Legend was the prelude and inspiration for the most influential piece of zombie culture ever, Romero's Night of the Living Dead in 1968. While it wasn't the first (there was White Zombie in 1932 and I Walked with a Zombie in 1943), when you say "zombie movie" to most people, Romero's classic is probably the first image that comes to mind. And if it isn't, they're probably thinking of an image inspired by Romero's classic. Made on a small budget in a Pennsylvania farmhouse, Living Dead was a scathing critique of Vietnam-era America and a damn scary movie all at the same time. It proved that horror didn't have to be just about jumps and thrills, that you could actually make social commentary through the tears of fear. The word "zombie" is never actually used in Night of the Living Dead (although Romero would embrace it in his later Dead films), but it would still influence the genre more than any film before or ever since.

Romero would go on to direct four more Dead films, including Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead. Over the years, his films have inspired numerous remakes (two for Night, one for Dawn and one for Day) and a half-dozen sequels. The Dead movies are the Yankees of zombie culture -- never going away and occasionally ending up as world champions. As much as Night critiqued late-'60s values, the original Dawn of the Dead, arguably the best zombie movie ever made, was a strong commentary on American consumerism, with Day of the Dead functioning as Romero's commentary on the military complex of the '80s. Although it wasn't completely about zombies, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later was clearly influenced by the original Dead trilogy. In fact, the entire arc of 28 Days Later can be successfully grafted onto the Dead trilogy, with the first act of 28 Days reflecting the isolationism of Night, the second act of moving to the city reflecting the cultural commentary of Dawn, and the final act of Days focusing on military action just like Day of the Dead.

As '80s mainstream horror culture moved on to slashers like Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger, zombie movies went underground. Gordon made Re-Animator, Sam Raimi made the Evil Dead movies, not traditional zombie fare, but in the same family, and then, in 1992, Peter Jackson made Braindead (Dead Alive in the States), and a cult classic was born. Long before he played with Hobbits, Jackson was playing with zombie monkeys and buckets of blood, showing a new generation that the slow, moaning zombies of the Romero films could be tweaked and played with for a new kind of horror. If zombies had become boring to an era used to being entertained by Chucky and Jason, Dead Alive proved that the right director could have fun with the concept once again.

And zombies remained resigned to the underground film world for the next decade or so. Michele Soavi made Cemetery Man, another cult classic, in 1994, but it wasn't until the current millennium that zombies witnessed their biggest resurgence ever. As is often the case, one media medium influenced another. Resident Evil the video game became Resident Evil the movie in 2002 and helped push the sub-genre into new heights of action and mayhem. In Resident Evil, zombies weren't just slowly crawling across a cemetery, they were moving through a new post-apocalyptic world, shuffling faster than ever and with deadlier results. And, in a common theme in zombie movies all the way back to Romero, man was once again to blame for their existence.