Zombies
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One of the most popular forms of fiction today involves zombies. There are TV shows, movies, and books that all envision life during a zombie apocalypse. Zombie stories are a relatively new form of fiction. However, zombies didn't come out of nowhere. They have a basis in legend, religion, and fact. Well, sort of fact. Learn more about zombies, their origin, and how they've been portrayed in media on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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In fiction, a zombie is typically depicted as a reanimated corpse or an infected human being devoid of consciousness and self-awareness, driven by an insatiable urge to consume human flesh or brains. The characteristics of zombies can vary widely depending on the particular narrative or the mythos being explored.

28 Days Later, Night of the Living Dead, The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, World War Z, and Shaun of the Dead are just a few of the many, many zombie movies and TV shows. There is an entire Wikipedia page for zombie-themed movies and the count is close to 600. The odd thing is, the fictional notion of zombies that we have today is a relatively modern invention. Yet the idea of zombies didn't come out of nowhere. They have a basis that goes back several hundred years.

Many cultures had varying ideas of death and the transition from life to death. There are some who think that gravestones developed as a type of belief to keep the undead from rising. It was literally a stone put on the grave to prevent the dead from getting up. However, the fictional zombies that we think of today have a very particular origin. Haiti.

The French colony of Saint-Domingue, which is what it was called before it was known as Haiti, was built on the backs of slave labor. French plantations imported African slaves to work in the fields. And while there was slavery throughout the Caribbean, Brazil, and southern United States, slavery in Saint-Domingue was uniquely brutal. Many of the Africans brought to Saint-Domingue were treated as disposable, with very low life expectancies and brutal punishments.

The people who were brought over to be enslaved brought with them their traditions and beliefs that they practiced in Africa. The Congo and other parts of West and Central Africa had traditions involving spirit possession and reanimation of the dead. These beliefs were integral to the spiritual systems and worldviews of various African cultures. In many African societies, the boundary between life and death is viewed as permeable. Ancestors are believed to play an active role in the lives of the living, and the spirits of the deceased can be invoked, appeased, or feared.

The word zombie is believed to have originated from Africa. It could come from the Congo word zumbi, which means fetish, or dijumbi, which means ghost. And it also may have come from the Kimbundu language in Angola, where the word nzambi means deity. These African beliefs were not in and of themselves the origin of zombies. It required those beliefs to come to Haiti, where they encountered French Catholicism.

Upon the arrival in Haiti, enslaved Africans were typically baptized into the Roman Catholic Church and encouraged to practice Christianity. Over time, these enslaved people blended their traditional African religions with elements of Christianity, a process known as religious syncretism. This blending was partially a response to the suppression of African religions by the colonial authorities, leading practitioners to disguise their deities as Catholic saints.

For example, the voodoo spirit Papa Legba was often associated with St. Peter, who similarly held keys and controlled access to the spiritual world. The blending of traditional African beliefs with Christianity in Haiti became known as voodoo. The development of the concept of zombies in Haiti is deeply rooted in the broader context of Haitian voodoo and its complex views on life, death, and the afterlife.

This concept is particularly tied to the Haitian understanding of the soul in the afterlife and how these beliefs serve both as a deterrent to suicide and a form of social control. The afterlife in Haitian voodoo is often envisioned as a return to the ancestral homeland, specifically an idyllic world known as Guinea. This is not the physical region of Africa, but a spiritual reflection of it, where ancestors live under the benevolent watch of the spirits and are reunited with their loved ones.

To reach Guinea, the soul must be released properly at death through specific funeral rituals, which ensures that the soul passes from the physical world to the spiritual one without any hindrance. However, if you committed suicide, you could not enter Guinea. This was relevant because the conditions in Haiti were so bad that many slaves chose to take their own lives rather than to continue to live such an existence.

When someone commits suicide, their soul is at risk of being captured by a sorcerer, known as a bokor, before it can travel to Guinea. The bokor can use the captured spirit to reanimate the corpse and enslave the individual who becomes a zombie. The reanimated corpse or zombie is then trapped in a state of limbo, unable to continue to Guinea and bound to serve the bokor. You'd become a permanent slave, never able to break free.

So the threat of becoming a zombie, a fate worse than death, was used to scare people into not killing themselves. And there's more to the story. There are voodoo practitioners who have an extensive knowledge of herbalisms and toxins, enabling them to concoct various potions for a wide range of purposes, including the creation of zombie powders. Some of these powders include tetrodotoxin, a potent neurotoxin found in several marine species, most notably in pufferfish.

Tetrodotoxin is known to block sodium channels on the neural membrane, preventing the conduction of nerve impulses and leading to paralysis and even the appearance of death. While rare, there are documented cases of voodoo practitioners using these zombie powders to induce a state of paralysis and then revive the person. The British medical journal The Lancet documented three such cases in a 1997 article.

So, when I said in the introduction that zombies kind of, sort of have a basis in fact, this is what I was referring to. So, if the idea of a zombie is based on Haitian beliefs, how did it become the zombies that we see in movies? Zombies entered the broader Western popular culture through literature and travel reports. In the 1920s and 30s, Americans and European tourists became fascinated with Haitian voodoo, and their accounts often sensationalized aspects of the religion.

The 1929 book, The Magic Island by William Seabrook, is credited with introducing the zombie concept to a broader audience. This book describes zombies as living beings under the control of a powerful sorcerer, which captured people's imagination in the United States. Hollywood soon took up the zombie theme, starting with the 1932 film White Zombie, which is often considered to be the first full-length zombie movie.

This movie starring Bela Lugosi portrays a man who turns a woman into a zombie using magic. While maintaining the theme of mind control, it began the association of zombies with horror rather than their original cultural context. The real transformation in the zombie narrative, however, came with George Romero's 1968 film The Night of the Living Dead.

Romero redefined the zombie as an undead flesh eater, a departure from the mind-controlled slaves of Haitian voodoo, stripping away the mystical and specific cultural context of Haiti altogether. Romero's zombies were mindless and driven purely by the instinct to feed. More importantly, they could transmit their condition via bites, adding a contagion element to the myth.

Also, unlike their often mystical origins in Haitian culture, zombies in most modern fiction do not possess consciousness or a sense of individuality. They're typically portrayed as mindless automatons. Finally, these zombies almost always have their origin in science, be it a chemical or a disease, not at all anything spiritual.

Even though there are several takes on zombies in modern culture, pretty much every modern interpretation of zombies can trace its roots back to George Romero and the Night of the Living Dead. The zombie genre grew steadily in the 1980s with films like the 1985 Return of the Living Dead, which introduced zombies that could run and speak, adding a brand new dimension of horror.

The Resident Evil series, beginning in the 1990s, was pivotal in bringing zombies into the realm of interactive media, blending survival horror with action and complex narrative about bioterrorism. The 2000s and 2010s saw an explosion of zombie-themed movies and TV shows. The 2002 film, 28 Days Later, introduced fast-moving zombies, again providing a whole new reason to be scared of zombies. The comedic 2004 movie, Shaun of the Dead, showcased zombies in a humorous light, showing the versatility of the genre.

In 2006, the book World War Z and Oral History of the Zombie War was released by Max Brooks. It was written in the form of a future historical account of a zombie apocalypse that had happened in the past. And by the way, the movie World War Z with Brad Pitt has absolutely nothing to do with the book other than the title and the use of zombies.

The Walking Dead, which began in 2010, became a cultural phenomenon, focusing on long-term survival in a post-apocalyptic world made from zombies. In 2013, the video game The Last of Us was released, and it was subsequently turned into a series on HBO. This version of zombies has humans whose minds are controlled by a fungus, similar to an actual fungus that can control ants. Almost all of these zombie stories have one thing in common. They're really just plot devices to tell the story of the survivors.

Back during the Cold War, the same story might have taken place during a nuclear apocalypse, not a zombie one. Zombie stories have become so prevalent that in 2011, the Center for Disease Control actually published a blog post titled Preparedness 101 Zombie Apocalypse. It was so popular, it actually crashed their website. Now at this point, I want to personally inject my problem with most zombie stories.

I understand that there is a certain amount of suspension of disbelief that is required to enjoy a zombie movie. So for the sake of the story, I have no problem accepting the premise that there's some communicable disease that could cause zombie-like symptoms. My problem comes with what happens next. In most stories, zombies are around for a really long time. Some stories take place decades after the initial zombie infestation.

Except for human flesh, zombies don't seem to eat. They don't grow food. Most zombies violate the laws of thermodynamics. Whether you consider zombies dead or alive, they are animate. They move, which requires the expenditure of energy, especially if they're fast zombies as opposed to slow zombies.

They have to get energy from somewhere, and they can only expend energy from their human host for so long before they would eventually starve. The only movie I've seen that takes this seriously is 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, where the zombies starve after a few weeks. The virus can lie dormant, and there can be asymptomatic carriers, but it otherwise at least honors the laws of physics. Rant over.

So the next time you watch a movie or a TV show that has a zombie apocalypse, or you dress up as a zombie for Halloween, just remember that even though it's changed quite a bit, it has its origins in early Haitian religious beliefs. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiefer.

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