The rising of the dead is one of humankind's oldest fears. Zombies – the living dead –have their factual basis in Haitian voodoo. Most national folklore contain tales of similar creatures but Haiti's zombies are used as slave labour, brought back to life by voodoo for an existence of mindless drudgery.
The zombie as a stock type is unique in the horror genre. While embodying many traditional horror elements – the returning dead (Dracula), the lurching thing (Frankenstein), man-into-monster (the werewolf), mastery of the soul beyond death, the use of witchcraft – the zombie has no literary roots whatsoever.
Since WB Seabrook's The Magic Isle in the 1920's which purported to tell of 'true' zombie cases in Haiti, there have been a handful of voodoo zombie stories written (including Charles Birkin's Ballet Negre (1965)) but stories using the zombie in different contexts have been more common (e.g. Richard Matheson's Dance of the Dead (1955) or Gordon Honeycombe's Neither The Sea Nor The Sand (1969)).
George A Romero's film Night Of The Living Dead (1968) permanently changed the image of the zombie in horror cinema and literature. Drawing from the EC Comics (such as Vault Of Horror and Tales From The Crypt) of his childhood, Romero emancipated the zombie, recasting it as a shambling decaying caricature of humanity with an insatiable desire to eat living human flesh. Despite dancing with Michael Jackson in Thriller (1983) and voting out Dubya in Homecoming (2005), it is as a mob of carnivores that the zombie is now most recognised. Not even Wade Davis' 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow, which set the record straight about Haitian zombies, managed to alter our perceptions.
Now Mark Whitehead gets to grips with the question: What is a Zombie? and tells you everything you ever needed to know about this powerful archetype.
