Scary Zombies

Zombies go hand in hand with the horror. Images of blood drenched mouths, rotting flesh, ragged clothing and soulless eyes are all common images of the living dead. Films such as Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead have burned this frightening figure into the minds of millions, while video games, books and comics have followed suit. The western, horror genre obsession with zombies has been long standing, but there is a lot more to the history of zombies than entertainment.

Why do people love zombies so much in popular culture? What makes the zombie so scary? The reason that zombies are so scary comes from both the way that they are created and also the way that they behave. Zombies are literally the worst thing that some people can imagine; people that are dead, but come back to life to terrorize the living. Most zombie stories all start the same way, there is usually an outbreak of some strange disease or other apocalypse-like setting. Zombie stories also share the fact that it does not take a lot for the living to become a zombie. Usually a small bite or close interaction will result in a living person slipping into the realm of undead. The fact that one can be so easily infected and become a zombie makes them that much more scary. The horde like nature of zombies is also very scary. Though zombies are usually depicted as slow moving characters, the sheer volume makes them overwhelming and frightening. Zombies are usually in groups of hundreds, if not thousands. Put this high number against a small group of three or four and people and the odds are always in the zombies favor. The prospect of defeating zombies is always slim, the only option is to try and outrun them.

Though the zombie is thought of mainly as a fictional fear, there are some places in history where the zombie was considered a legitimate threat. In the cultures of Western Africa and Haiti, the zombie was a very real, albeit superstitious concern. In West African culture, a zombie can be created if a wizard, or bokor, brings a dead person back to life. This resurrected being was believed to have a temporary, spiritual existence. Haitian Vodou folklore also includes the existence of zombies. As recently as 1937, a family reported that their daughter, Felicia Felix-Mentor, came back to them in zombie form after dying in 1907. While researchers, most notably Harvard ethnobotanist, Wade Davis, have studied the occurrence and there have been no conclusive findings. Davis believed that zombie-like results could be obtained through a mixture of toxins found in local animals and other drugs, and wrote about them in his two works, Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988). This was modern sciences last attempt at dealing with zombies as an issue of reality, interest in zombies has not faltered. Countless websites are devoted to logging zombie encounters and sightings, along with the writing many fictional scenes in history where zombies could have flourished.