by Joe Makintosh

Created on: June 21, 2010   Last Updated: September 29, 2010

The Zombie has gone through many changes in its long history, it's been alive, dead, slow, fast, clever, stupid but it has always remained deadly. It confronts us with our fear of the breakdown of society, our fear of death and of our loved ones trying to hurt us.

The Zombie's history started in Haiti with the Voodoo culture. A Bokor, a sorcerer, takes a living person and poisons them with a potion or a spell. The unfortunate person would soon die only to be brought back as a "zombi." They have no recollection of anything before their death and are doomed to work for the Bokor forever. Some Voodoo Zombies have been known to regain some of their mental capacity by being in a place or a situation which held many strong emotions for the person before their death.

However, this is not just folklore. Some Haitians have become Zombies - or at least appeared to - in the form of a trance. Even the Haitian dictator during the 1960's said he would return after his death to continue ruling the country.

From this we have George A. Romero, the grandfather of the Modern Zombie. His works include the "Of the Dead" films like Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Night of the Living Dead. His Zombies took a new form from that of the Voodoo Zombies - they serve no master. These Zombies have no motives or orders, they just want to eat. Anybody who dies by any means will return as a Zombie to feed on the living. They also popularise the most common way of "killing" these monsters: aim for the head. You can cut their arms off, repeatedly stab them in the heart or burn them to a crisp but the only true way of killing them is to destroy the brain.

Romero's Zombies are a metaphor for the modern American culture. In Dawn of the Dead, they swarm to the shopping mall because "it's some kind of Instinct, memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives." The Zombies show that in life, the Zombie's were about prayer or good deeds or looking after family; they just loved the trivial, insignificant things in life and now here they are after death, carrying on the same old routine.

While Romero's Zombies were slow, shambling creatures who could not be killed easily, Danny Boyle's Zombies were another major departure from the original Voodoo - they were alive and fast. In his film "28 Days Later," the Zombies are not dead. They are living people infected by a virus, a theory popular at the turn of the century. The "Rage Virus" pumped up the infected's adrenaline

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