 Starring: Dave Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross
Director: George A. Romero
Year Of Release: 1978
Plot: A few weeks after the events of Night of the Living Dead, the situation is getting worse, so two reporters, along with two SWAT team members, decide to steal a helicopter to find a place where they can hide from flesh eating zombies. They find a secluded mall and decide to stop there for the night in order to get some sleep. They decide to stay in the mall, and they barricade themselves in a small room while periodically going downstairs to get things they need, while defending themselves against the zombies and a biker gang. |
Along with werewolves and vampires, zombies have become a staple of horror movies, however the idea that if people came back to life they’d immediately become shuffling, unthinking cannibals is a bit of an odd one, so where did the idea come from?
The normal thought is that zombies originated from voodoo, but while that’s true of the term, it’s not really true of the creatures themselves – at least how they appear in modern films and book. In traditional voodoo, zombies are dead people who can be brought back to life by a bokor (sorcerer). They will remain under the bokor’s control because they have no will of their own. However, according to tradition, they’re more like soulless slaves than the flesh-eating ghouls we’ve become used to.
Incidentally, there are some who say there may be some truth in the voodoo zombie idea, but not that bokor’s are really bringing people back to life. In the 1980s, Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis put forward the theory that the bokor could use two powders to more or less convince someone they were a zombie. The first would poison them to produce a death-like state, while the second would contain compounds that produce a dissociative state, leaving the person more or less under the bokor’s control. However other have criticised this idea, and indeed most cases of alleged zomibification have turned out to involve either outright deceit or mental illness.
Either way, these are not the zombies from the movies. These ravenous undead have both a much longer and shorter history than voodoo. The idea of the living dead running around and causing trouble is ancient. The 3,000 year old Epic Of Gilgamesh describes zombie-like creatures under the control of the goddess Ishtar, who threatens to raise the dead and have them devour the people unless her father gives her the Bull of Heaven. Likewise ‘ghouls’ appear in the likes of One Thousand and One Nights and have been a prominent part of European folklore from time immemorial.
However unlike vampires and werewolves, which have existed in a form similar to how we understand them today for centuries, zombies as a specific term for creatures that have been raised from the dead didn’t come into the English-language until the 1920s. The word ‘zombie’ is believed to have been popularised in American in 1929, when a book called The Magic Island by W.B. Seabrook was published, which is a sensationalised account of the narrator’s travels in Haiti and his encounters with heavily fictionalised voodoo cults.
However it was H.P. Lovecraft who was the first to shift the undead away from voodoo and turn them into a modern horror monster. Some say his 1925 story In The Vault is the first recorded modern story that suggested that when the undead come back to life, the thing they’d want to do above all else is bite people (that said, it’s a more Edgar Allen Poe type mystery than a full-on zombie story). However, while he didn’t use the term zombie and they weren’t exactly flesh-eating ghouls we understand as the undead today, Lovecraft’s work that probably left the greatest impact on the evolution of the zombie is his 1921/1922 work, Herbert West-Reanimator. The serialised story was ahead of its time in featuring corpses rising from the dead (through scientific means), and being animalistic, unspeaking and uncontrollably violent creatures. They are probably the first undead that are specifically recognisable as modern zombies, although they also give more than a passing nod to Frankenstein (which is after all, a zombie story, even if we don’t normally see it as such).
The first zombie movie is usually said to be the 1932 Bela Lugosi film, White Zombie, although here they were more like the voodoo zombies – unthinking henchmen of an evil magician. However all these were really merely proto-undead, offering ideas that helped create the modern movie obsession with the living dead, but none of which brought all the ideas together.
For that we had to wait for 1968 and George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead. Romero took many of the early zombie ideas, but then added in things from other sources. The most notable of these is Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, I Am Legend. Although presented on its first release as a modern vampire tale (and that’s what the bad guys are called), if you read Matheson’s book now it seems much more like a zombie story, purely because of a lot of the ideas Matheson put forward have become the undead archetype via Romero’s Living Dead films.
In I Am Legend, rather than a mysterious magical figure turning people into vampires/zombies, it is a plague, with the bacterial apocalypse leaving everyone endlessly wanting to bite and attack others (the book popularised the disease apocalypse idea that became central to the zombie genre). Also notably zombie-like is that although he later realises different, the main character sees those infected as having lost their humanity. They may do things they used to do, but it’s in an almost automatic, unthinking way. Their main impetus in life (or death, as the plague affects both the living and the deceased) is to attack, kill or infect others, and they come in hordes to his house every night to try and murder him.
Although the end of the novel sort of turns this on its head (which the Will Smith film sort of paid tribute to but largely screwed up), Romero took the ideas of a plague turning people into unthinking, unstoppable killers and ran with it. Indeed, in an 2008 Cinema Blend interview, Romero noted “I ripped off the idea for the first film [Night Of The Living Dead] from a Richard Matheson novel called Am Legend, which is now back with us after a couple of incarnations prior. I thought Am Legend was about revolution. I said if you’re going to do something about revolution you should start at the beginning. I mean, Richard starts his book with one man left; everybody in the world has become a vampire. I said we got to start at the beginning and tweak it up a little bit. I couldn’t use vampires because he did so I wanted something that would be an earth-shaking change. Something that was forever, something that was really at the heart of it. I said, so what if the dead stop staying dead? ... And the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this. That’s really all [the zombies] ever represented to me. In Richard’s book, in the original I Am Legend, that’s what I thought that book was about. There’s this global change and there’s one guy holding out saying, wait a minute, I’m still a human. He’s wrong. Go ahead. Join them. You’ll live forever! In a certain sense he’s wrong but on the other hand, you’ve got to respect him for taking that position.”
Although Matheson wasn’t that impressed with Night Of The Living dead, it is the first time all the elements of what we now understand as the zombie movie – a plague, unthinking undead who only want to kill, a small band of survivors – came together. And just to show how modern all this is, it’s interesting that in the same interview, Romero says even he didn’t call them zombies back in 1968, “When I did Night of the Living Dead I called them ghouls, flesh eaters. To me back then, zombies were just those boys in Caribbean doing the wet-work for Bela Lugosi. So I never thought of them as zombies. I thought they were just back from the dead... I didn’t use the word ‘zombie’ until the second film and that’s only because people who were writing about the first film called them zombies. And I said, maybe they are in a way. But to me zombies were separate in the rainbow.”
Since then, Night Of The Living Dead and Romero’s follow-ups, Dawn Of The Dead and Day Of The Dead, have become the archetypes, and even when zombie movies diverge from the norm (such as the speedy, infected Rage sufferers in 28 Days Later), the change is always referred to in terms of how it deviates from Romero’s shuffling, unstoppable, flesh-eaters.
Romero essentially bred the ghouls with the vampire, mixed it with ideas taken from I Am Legend (particularly the idea of an apocalyptic revolution), and ever since then this has been what zombies have meant to most people – even if that’s not what he called them himself. It was also Romero who created the idea of zombie movies commenting on society, and many (although not all) other have followed this. Dawn Of The Dead, for example, is renowned for not just using its shopping mall setting as a cool location, but for allowing it to comment on modern culture, with the zombies as brainless consumers.
It’s interesting that while we tend to think of zombies coming from ancient Haitian and African voodoo, while that’s where the term may have originated, the bokor’s undead are very different to what we understand zombies to be today. For that we only need to go back 38 years to Night Of The Living Dead, which mixed together everything from H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Matheson, to voodoo and a few things Romero thought of himself together to pretty much created a new genre, which has now taken on a life of its own.
TIM ISAAC
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