Z

ZOMBIES

The figure now known as the zombie has haunted the peripheries of folklore and narratives since the first stirrings of literature. Defying concrete definition, the figure has been in a state of flux, metamorphosing with each appearance, standing as a descriptive manifestation of cultural anxieties regarding selfhood and the transition from life to death. Its prominence in contemporary narratives is the result of a unique evolutionary development in which traditional stories were altered by popular fiction and film to form a new entry in the gallery of iconic monsters.

The concepts of death and the separation of the soul from the body, or the frightening prospect of a rampant body lacking the guiding reticence of a soul, have figured as themes within folklore and literature since The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2100 BCE), in which the goddess Ishtar threatens to raise the dead so that they can feed upon the living. Revenants arise in folklore from such varied sources as the Chinese hopping corpse known as Jiangshi and the Scandinavian underworld figure called draugr to the Bible with its multiple examples of human resurrection in the name of God.

The first English appearance of the word “zombie” was in Robert Southey’s three-volume History of Brazil, published between 1810 and 1819. The “zombie” to which Southey refers is the “nzambi” deity of Angolan folklore. It was not until 1929, however, that the notion of zombieism took hold of the American imagination with the publication of William Seabrook’s anthropological account of Haiti, The Magic Island. Seabrook describes Haiti as an island of magic and Voodoo, detailing local accounts of bodies turned into zombies by Houngans, practitioners of Voodoo. These Haitian zombies are described as dead-eyed, laboring brutes, controlled with magic to fulfill the commands of the Voodoo master.

Seabrook’s colorful account of Haiti and Voodoo went on to inspire further developments of the zombie figure, the most notable being the horror film White Zombie (1932), directed by Victor and Edward Halperin. Further examples of the Haitian zombie were depicted in similar films, such as in King of the Zombies (1941), Revolt of the Zombies (1936), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943).

Simultaneously, an alternative version of the zombie figure was emerging. Inspired by the proto-science fiction narrative of Mary Shelley’s seminal Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818) and the somnambulist Cesare from Robert Wiene’s film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922) saw a zombie-like figure emerge that connected scientific zombiefication with cannibalism. The zombie continued to appear as a figure straddling the boundary between Gothic horror and science fiction in films such as Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), where extraterrestrials resurrect the dead to wage war against humanity.

World War Z: Breaking the Zombie Mold

Max Brooks’s 2006 novel World War Z was a pivotal novel in the renaissance of zombie fiction in the early twenty-first century, offering a distinct and influential approach to the living dead as a genre by exploring the fall of humanity and society as a result of governmental bureaucracy, ignorance, miscommunication, and global distrust that allowed the zombie virus to spread out of control. In writing the book as a follow-up to his best-selling Zombie Survival Guide (2003), Brooks deliberately chose to avoid the established zombie narrative that focuses on a group of survivors forced to protect themselves from the cannibalistic undead. Instead World War Z is structured as an oral history (modeled on Studs Terkel’s 1984 nonfiction book The Good War: An Oral History of World War II) in which the battle for survival is presented as a global war against an enemy that is relentless and ever-growing.

Forgoing a traditional hero in favor of a multitude of narrators from around the world and across social strata, the novel is constructed as a series of eyewitness testimonies, recounting the firsthand experiences of each stage of a global zombie outbreak and war. While the war has ostensibly been won, this conglomeration of international voices, from military tacticians and CIA operatives to nurses, clerics, and those caring for the survivors, considers the war’s global ramifications, reflecting on how it has reshaped international communities and identity. The novel offers an alternative to the Anglo-Eurocentrism of much of apocalyptic and horror literature, in which the apocalypse is usually equated with the fall of the Western world, by highlighting the impact of sociocultural, economic, and military decisions of global superpowers upon global citizens. It is on the scale of the apocalypse that the horror within the novel lies.

Stacey Abbott

While film director George A. Romero is famously credited as the creator of the modern zombie, it was with the publication of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend in 1954 that the depiction of a zombie-like figure veered away from the familiar mind-controlled Haitian zombie toward a zombie imbued with new characteristics. Albeit not strictly a zombie novel, Matheson’s vampiric figures served as the inspiration for the popular contemporary zombies that dominate film, literature, and video games today. Not only did Matheson’s text invert the Gothic threat from something that haunts from within to an external threat attempting to invade the sanctuary of the Gothic edifice, but it further informed the zombie mythos by interpreting the figure within a dystopian framework, thereby linking the figure with the notion of apocalypse. Further, I Am Legend established the plague mythology as a replacement for Voodoo zombieism.

It was not until the 1964 film adaptation of Matheson’s novel, retitled The Last Man on Earth and starring Vincent Price, that the early form of the zombie began to take shape. The trailer for the film makes multiple references to the creatures’ zombie-like nature and opens with the title card, “This is the world of the living dead,” a phrase that went on to inspire Romero’s first installment of his zombie film series, Night of the Living Dead, a mere four years later.

In Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), radioactive contamination from a returning space probe is responsible for the dead rising from their graves. Following Night of the Living Dead, with its African American protagonist serving as social commentary on racial issues in America, and its basic plot and characterizations offering subtextual criticism of the Vietnam War (1955–1975), Romero continued to release zombie films that echoed the societal concerns of the time. Dawn of the Dead (1978) served as a critique of American capitalism and the cult of consumerism. Day of the Dead (1985) critiqued the Cold War, Land of the Dead (2005) questioned the unequal divide between the American rich and poor, Diary of the Dead (2007) commented on surveillance culture, and Survival of the Dead (2009) focused on patriarchal pride. Romero’s use of the zombie as a figure of social criticism cemented the figure as a malleable representation of changing societal concerns.

Examples of living zombies can also be seen in Romero’s The Crazies (1975, remade 2010), Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), and the sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007), which depict the apocalyptic effects of untested bioweapons that turn the infected living into homicidal zombie figures. The upsurge of zombie narratives post-9/11 could be seen as a representation of violence against the dehumanized other, while comedic zombie films such as Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) exhibit social commentary on how the mindless regularity of daily routine has already disconnected humanity from reality; society is already in a zombiefied state.

The most recent development of the zombie figure has seen the zombie repositioned as the sympathetic hero, or antihero, as more narratives are frequently imbuing the zombie with sentience. Zombies like those in Isaac Marion’s novel Warm Bodies (2010), adapted into a film of the same name in 2013, are given the capacity to redevelop the human qualities of self-awareness and conscience, and even fall in love. Dominic Mitchell’s BBC drama series In the Flesh (2013–2014) depicts a society in which zombies can control their hunger through regulated doses of medicine, and in this condition attempt to reassimilate into the society they once ravaged, albeit as persecuted Others. This attempt to humanize the zombie reflects contemporary societal concerns with the isolation of “Others” within society and the restructuring of a more inclusive system of racial and gender rights.

Unlike the zombie’s horror brethren, the vampire and the werewolf, who found their popularity in folklore and literature prior to their emergence in film, the zombie has always been a staple figure of the horror film genre and has only seen its popularity as a literary figure increased in the post-9/11 imagination. Alden Bell’s The Reapers Are the Angels (2010), Mira Grant’s Feed (2010), and the popular World War Z (2006) by Max Brooks serve as notable examples of classic zombie apocalypse novels; while John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Handling the Undead (2005), Joe McKinney’s Dead World series (2009–2014), and Brian Keene’s The Rising series (2003–2015) contribute alternative approaches to the figure of the zombie. Keene’s first novel, The Rising (2003), features bodies that have been possessed by evil spirits following a failed particle accelerator experiment; the theme of possession allows for sentient zombies with manipulative intelligence.

The zombie has also gained popularity as the literary subject of graphic novels, popularized by Robert Kirkman’s comic book series The Walking Dead (2003–present), which has been adapted into a television series of the same name, and Chris Robertson and Michael Allred’s comic book series iZOMBIE (2010–2012), featuring a sentient zombie named Gwen who works in a morgue, also adapted into a television series of the same name. The zombie has even invaded classic literature with the mash-up novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), a parody by Seth Grahame-Smith that sees Elizabeth Bennet taking on the role of zombie hunter, as she and her four sisters fight off a horde of zombies.

The malleability of the zombie and the continued popularity of its use as a figure of social critique ensures that the zombie will continue to function in narratives that explore the sociopolitical concerns of contemporary humanity.

Kelly Gardner

See also: Ajvide Lindqvist, John; Frankenstein; I Am Legend; Keene, Brian.