As Monster Histories continue, today I will be talking about one of the most popular monsters of the recent few decades: the Zombie. The zombie is interesting on many levels, because it seems every decade moviemakers add something new to the mythology about how one becomes a zombie, what they eat, what they can do and how they can be destroyed. So where did zombies originally come from?

Follow up:

Like a lot of common tropes and fears in mythology, almost all cultures have some story about some type of animated corpse. During Roman times corpses were burned both to help the spirit reach the afterlife, as well as prevent 'Lemurs' or 'Larvae', evil spirits using human form. The Arabs have a tradition of desert dwelling monsters called Ghouls that will feed on human flesh. And during the time of the Black Plague, the 'Danse Macrabre' was a common image in art, with its dancing skeletons and twisted corpses. The word 'Zombie' comes from Caribbean Voodoo, based off of West African and some Christian influences. In Voodoo, a Zombie is a corpse that has been animated and reunited with its soul to do the bidding of the priest or witch doctor that summoned him/her. Unlike movie zombies in most cases, Voodoo Zombies have minds of their own, but their wills are controlled by their masters, they are essentially undead slaves.

This is of course, not the typical depiction in today's pop culture. Generally, zombies are depicted as mindless walking corpses that when activated, seek nothing more than to kill and consume living things. The predecessor to zombie movies was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a German film about a madman scientist who uses a catatonic insomniac who he orders to kill people. I say this is the 'first' zombie movie because Cesare, the insomniac, behaves and moves very much like the zombies in early zombie pictures.

The beginning of the zombie movie of course, began with George Romero in the 1960s. With his movies the modern zombie mythology was born.