Source: http://www.examiner.com/
Within the past 10 years, zombies have become one of the most prominent creatures of the night. The Resident Evil movies and video games, I Am Legend, 28 Days Later and its sequel 28 Weeks Later are just some of the big blockbusters in popular culture. This does not even begin to address the high number of B horror flicks like Zombie Strippers that are on the market capitalizing on the horror trend. With the genre as huge as it is, where do zombies come from?
The origin of the zombie resembles nothing like that is portrayed in current movies. The term zombie originally comes from the West African based religion of Voudou (also known as voodoo) in the form of the word “zumbi” on “zonbi” which means departed spirit or ghosts. A zombie was originally a body without a soul; a dead person brought back to life by voudoun sorcerer. Without any will of his own, it mindlessly served the sorcerer as an animated corpse. The idea was still considered frightening to be depicted in movies, as far back as 1943 in the classic movie I Walked With a Zombie. However, the movies also served to perpetuate stereotypes of Voudou as an exotic religion with only dark magics from the peoples brought over from West Africa and settling in Cuba, Haiti and among the creole in Louisiana.
The modern depiction of the flesh and braining eating zombie mostly owes its existence to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968. Although zombies of this genre have existed before this one in other movies, what made this movie stand out was that the plot introduces creatures that infect ordinary people and then those people kill their loved ones by consuming them without feeling, knowledge or remorse. This idea scares people so much that a psychological term was invented: ambulothanatophobia, the fear of zombies.
However, flesh eating monsters did exist before zombies were around and they were usually called ghouls. The term ghoul comes from the Arabic word “guhl” which means “demon.” Demons in that part of the world were thought to disguise themselves, lure people to the middle of nowhere and devour their flesh. But since Night of the Living Dead, any undead that ate flesh was considered a “zombie.”
Among the paranormal, the zombies of the apocalypse that eat brains and or flesh do not exist except in movies. If anything, we should be more worried about the flesh eating bacteria streptococcus pyogenes. It can enter the body through a wound nearly undetected, cause blisters and rotting of the flesh and kill within 24 hours. Scary? Yes. Real? Yes. But still not as creatively scary enough as a zombie.
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