In honor of Mrs. Nerd Fix’s birthday today I bring you a history of Zombies in America, courtesy of i09.com
In America, the legends of zombies grew out of the cultures created by African slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean. Folklore experts have traced the idea of the zombi back to Vodoun practices in Haiti, where tales have long been told of people brought back from the dead as shambling shadows of themselves. Sometimes these zombis are under the control of a master, and sometimes they simply wander mindlessly.
So when did the flesh-eating, Americanized “zombie” emerge into pop culture, out of African-Caribbean myths circulated during slavery? Probably in the early 1920s, when sensationalistic accounts of “Voodoo” from white tourists in Haiti began to percolate into pulp fiction by authors like H.P. Lovecraft. And then came the turning point: In 1932, Bela Lugosi starred in White Zombie, about an evil white colonialist in Haiti whose sugar mills are run entirely by zombies. Here’s an amazing sequence from the film, where we meet the protagonist, a plantation owner in Haiti, who is in love with another man’s fiancee. He seeks out Lugosi at the sugar mill to get some zombie serum so he can zombie up his beloved and marry her:
i09 goes onto explain how many of the early zombie movies kept their roots in the voodoo culture until the 1960’s with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Since then zombie movies are more critiques of modern culture. Consumerism and government sponsored unethical science run amok are two big themes in modern zombie movies (along with lots of blood and gore.) i09 even did a study that highlighted that at times of social unrest and war is usually when the most zombie movies came out. That might explain the popularity of the television show The Walking Dead on AMC about the survivors in a zombie filled world.
And to the wife: Happy Birthday and BRAAAINS!
