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Like all good horror stories, zombie films, games and books tap into some of our deepest cultural fears. The image of the shambling corpse that so terrified cult audiences throughout the 20th century eventually gave way to the running zombies that have dominated newer zombie stories. This evolution reflects the shift in anxieties about contemporary life.

A Reflection of Cultural Fears

Humanity’s fear of death is the driving force behind many of the stories people have told each other, from the religious myths of the ancients to the television shows of today. Stories about the dead walking among the living can be found in cultures all over the world. The concept of reanimated corpses with an insatiable urge to feed on the bodies of the living even appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest written works of literature in the world.

In all of these stories of the dead returning to life, the people who come back from the dead are mysteriously changed. Humans fear death, but they also fear coming back wrong or changed in some inexplicable and uncontrollable way. One of the constant threats present in zombie stories is the fear of being turned into a zombie oneself, becoming part of the ravenous, implacable horde, or of being the person who must choose between killing an infected loved one.

Afro-Caribbean Zombies

The word “zombie” is derived from the Haitian Creole word “zonbi,” itself a derivative of the North Mbundu word “nzumbe.” In the West African Vodou religion, sorcerers called bokors created zombies. The bokors’ methods of creating zombies differed depending on legends. Some legends featured bokors who could truly reanimate the dead with magic. Other legends tell of bokors who use their knowledge of rootwork and poisons on their victims. These poisons would send the person into a coma-like state that would cause him or her to appear to be dead, even affecting their breathing and heart rates. After the person was determined to be dead, the bokor would give them a psychoactive drug that would allow them to be completely controllable.

Zombies in Popular Culture: the 1920s to the 1960s

The Magic Island, a sensationalized eyewitness account of voodoo activities in Haiti, was published in 1929. It was the first book with wide commercial appeal to discuss zombies. Three years later, in 1932, the first zombie feature film was released for American audiences. White Zombie was based upon The Magic Island took place in Haiti and told the story of a white American woman who was turned into a zombie by Charles Murder, a white voodoo priest who had many zombie slaves.

Although White Zombie received poor reviews at the time of its release, it had an effect on American culture that was similar to The Magic Island. Zombies, reanimated slaves under the control of exotic voodoo priests, took hold of American’s imaginations. Zombie stories continued to proliferate throughout the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s in books, movies and comics, all of which influenced filmmaker George Romero.

Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead introduced the concept of hordes of shambling corpses with the urge to feed on human flesh. Romero’s zombies were not the product of voodoo but probably radioactive contaminants. The film was released in 1968, when American cultural panic about radiation was at its highest because of the Cold War and the constant threat of mutually-assured destruction. The Communist witch hunts of the 1950s had sown the seeds of panic about our neighbors and friends turning into the enemy. Night of the Living Dead was so terrifying because it reflected American fears of nuclear destruction and people’s fears of each other.

Zombies in Contemporary Popular Culture

Contemporary zombie stories tend to be set in a post-apocalyptic environments. American cultural fears have undergone a shift from the bygone era of the Soviet menace. Zombies in more recent films, stories and video games tend to be reanimated by viruses, prions and other biological threats, probably because American zombie media released within the past decade have targeted toward a culture under the ever-present threat of biological terrorist attacks. Zombies in modern films are runners, as opposed to the shuffling zombies of past eras in film. They express uncontrollable rage and demonstrate intelligence, a reflection of enemies who come from different cultures whose motives we do not understand.

Our anxieties about modern medicine, which is so often experimental and insufficiently monitored by government agencies, also appear in modern zombie films. The zombie outbreak in the film I Am Legend was caused by unforeseen effects of a cancer-curing virus. The Rage virus in the film 28 Days Later was developed by researchers attempting to develop an inhibitor for human anger.

Modern zombie media tend to also be populated by antiheroes, people with deep character flaws who find themselves fighting the zombie menace. Characters in The Walking Dead and Zombieland are inflexible, aggressive, violent men with alpha complexes. Characters in zombie movies are also often gleeful about killing people whom they hated in real life, an unheroic urge many people feel in real life but must repress.