The History of Zombies By: Albert Bohnet

What is Historical About Zombies? Well, December 21/12/12 is coming up, so you never know what will happen. Jokes aside; The idea of Zombies has appeared in many cultures and has even recently become a big part of culture today. ▫Haitian Vodou and the Zombi. ▫South African and witches that can make Zombies ▫Popular Culture. ▫Zombies in Medieval folklore.

Some Perspective Zombies are not a recent occurrence. They appear in English literature going as far back as Shown here is this Google Ngram Viewer: ▫ Zombi%2C+Zombies&year_start=1700&year_end =2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share= Zombi%2C+Zombies&year_start=1700&year_end =2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share

Where? Most of the lore behind the Zombie seems to come out of Africa, with many of the different tribes and countries there having their own version of the Zombie. ▫Map of countries who have Zombies in their culture: //chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=340x140&cht=map :auto&chco=B3BCC0|3366CC|DC3912|FF9900| &chld=NE|HT|ZA|CG&chdl=Niger|Haiti|South Africa|Congo&chm=a,000000,0,3,7 Haiti relates because their culture comes from Africa, where their ancestors were from.

Where is the History of Zombies Going? To no surprise to anyone who keeps up with any kind of media, be it video games, literature, movies, etc, Zombies are going no where fast. The popularity of Zombies is definitely showing, the following graph really shows that: ▫(Source of the Zombie Film list: ms)

Zombies in Movies.

The Haitian Zombie Kieran M. Murphy wrote and article titles “White Zombie” that talks about the significance of the Zombie in Haitian culture. ▫The article goes into the reason why the Zombie is important in their culture, and how they are more than just cannibals in their folklore. ▫Murphy argues that the Zombie popularity was linked heavily to the times of slavery in Haiti.  “the historical slave resurfaces in Haiti through the phantasm of zombie as a dead body submissively toiling for its master” (Murphy 48). ▫The term master is important because the Haitian zombie is not so much a mindless beast doing what it pleases, but more a creature made and controlled by a Vodou priest or priestess.

The Zombie Today A journal article written by Allan Cameron draws interesting parallels with the Haitian zombies. Where the Haitian zombie was linked to slavery, the zombie today is linked to media. ▫Allan brings up Romero’s Diary of the Dead (2007) and how it parallels to the rapidly (and still rapidly) growing social media of the time. He brings up how the students in the film, now filming the zombie outbreak blindly and uploading them online parallels to the zombie outbreak itself (Cameron). ▫This analysis of the Romero film goes well with the ‘master’ ‘slave (zombie)’ of the Haitians and the ‘master (media)’ ‘slave (normal people)’ of Romero’s films.

Brains, Brains, the Musical Fruit The uprising of the zombie, when looked at simply may not be the most important of historical events, but it holds importance. The zombie is not just a mindless beast to be used in scary stories, it’s a means for people to express the metaphor of their society, in many cases a negative but important metaphor. For the Haitians, it was for their freedom. For the new age Zombie of today, its for the escape from becoming a drone of the media.

Sources: Murphy, Kieren M. "White Zombie." Contemporary French & Francophone Studies 15.1 (2011): EBSCOhost. Web. 15 Dec Cameron, Allan. "Zombie Media: Transmission, Reproduction, and the Digital Dead." Cinema Journal 52.1 (2012): EBSCOhost. Web. 15 Dec