Zombie – The Walking Dead

As a result of those TV shows, motion pictures, books, computer games, who would say that you don't know anything about zombies…  or isn't that right?

So, when you hear the word “zombies,” what enters your mind are those walking dead who wants to consume your brains. However, zombies are not really what they are supposed to be.

Today, we have two types of zombies – one is more religious/supernatural and the other is more into the science fiction genre. So get ready to read this article so you’ll know what to do before the coming Zombie Apocalypse. 

Farm Helpers

So what it a zombie? To know a zombie, we have to know its two basic criteria: First, it must be the reanimated corpse or possessed living body of one person, and second, zombies don’t have any free will. So in this category, vampires, mummies, Golems and the Philippine “maranhig” are not classified as zombies. 

What is quite suprising is the fact that zombies are not going to hurt you (or to eat your brains). In fact, the original zombie legend makes these “living dead” something like robot farm workers. In Haiti, zombies are not figures of terror because of what they might do to the living. In fact, these zombies are not capable of harming anyone. Instead, the zombie—a creature between life and death, an outcast, something with no will of its own—is a fearful symbol of human bondage.  The word zombie was first recorded in 1819, in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey from two African words,  "nzambi" (god) and "zumbi" (fetish) and it has something to do with the Voodoo religion of South America. 

According to the belief,  a bokor sorcerer, through a combination of drugs and black magic, puts the living into a deathlike state, then resurrects their ‘‘corpses’’ as slaves who perform grueling labor on some South America’s sugar plantations. 

Fish and Chemicals

It was found out in 1937 that zombification was factual because of the studies made by a famous author, anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). She discovered that voodoo and zombies are link together by a powerful psychoactive drug. In 1985, Wade Davis, a  Harvard ethnobotanist, presented a pharmacological case for zombies that connects it with  two special powders being introduced into the blood stream (usually via a wound). The first, coup de poudre (French: "powder strike"), includes tetrodotoxin (TTX), a powerful and frequently fatal neurotoxin found in the flesh of the pufferfish (order Tetraodontidae). The second powder consists of dissociative drugs such as datura. Together, these powders were said to induce a deathlike state in which the will of the victim would be entirely subjected to that of the bokor.

A New Walking Dead – Romero’s Zombies

It was the horror filmmaker George A. Romero, who introduced us with the type of zombies we are most familiar with. It will become the iconic representation of the creature to date. In his movie Night of the Living Dead (1968), Romero introduced us zombies who have the appetite of eating human flesh. This time, instead of just being a walking automation working in South America’s banana plantations, the zombies were transformed into walking decomposing bodies; dead, rotting corpses who are hunting humans for food. Also, unlike the original zombie, Romero’s zombies didn’t come from a Bokor’s potion and supernatural mumbo-jumbo, but instead, the precipitating cause is thought to be radiation leaking to earth from a satellite.

Night was the first of six films in Romero's Living Dead series. Its first sequel, Dawn of the Dead, was released in 1978, but Romero's reinvention of zombies is really his criticism on real social ills.  He used zombies as a vehicle "to criticize” the government ineptitude, bioengineering, slavery, greed and exploitation—while indulging our post-apocalyptic fantasies.

Zombie Apocalypse

Media then have depicted modern zombies far from the original Voodoo origins. Now, zombies are depicted as hapless victims of a strange disease outbreak that may be caused by a government science experiment gone wrong. For example, the British film 28 Days Later (2002) and 28 Weeks Later (2007), The Crazies (2010) and the video game series Resident Evil. 

Due to the recent rise of the subject of turning into a zombie because of a man-made epidemic, the Zombie Apocalypse has entered the zombie mythos. Here, we created an apocalyptic situation in which a disease epidemic will have the capacity to turn everyone into  zombies.

Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) novel has exploited the idea of a zombie apocalypse.  It is a fiction novel of supposed to be a collection of individual accounts narrated by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission, following the global conflict against the zombie plague. However, just like Romero, Max Brooks fictional scenario is his commentary on the US government ineptitude, government bureaucracy, corporate corruption, American isolationism, and human short-sightedness.

The Walking Dead (2014) is more character driven and less concerned with gory representations of the living dead, and is very heavily influenced by Romero’s Dead series. Created by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Tony Moore, the Walking Dead focuses on the usual struggles that ensue whenever a civilization is toppled by zombies, ranging from petty bickering about who does the laundry to more weighty. The plot focuses primarily on the dilemmas the group faces as they struggle to maintain their humanity during the day-to-day challenges of surviving in a hostile world. This includes battling the zombie hordes, coping with casualties, and dealing with predatory human survivors.