By Joe Deez
If you’ve left your home or turned on a television, you’ve probably noticed a number of people shuffling around you, moaning and getting agitated at the sight of other human beings. These are zombies, and they’re numbers are increasing every day. You might notice them banging and mashing their faces on your car windows at red lights. But have you ever wondered where they came from or what they want? Let’s dive into that, shall we?
The True History of Zombies
Zombies have been around for centuries, believe it or not. But what many people consider modern zombies are far from how they originated. Ask anyone where zombies came from and you’re sure to get a myriad of answers ranging anywhere from celestial occurrences to mad scientist laboratories. Some people might even tell you that world governments are at fault. But, although merited, every one of these beliefs is inaccurate.
WARNING: IT’S ABOUT TO GET UNCOMFORTABLE FOR AWHILE. BUT DON’T WORRY, IT’LL GET FUN AGAIN SOON.
Version One: The Nzambi
The story of zombies gets its start deep in the Congo on the world’s largest continent. The Kikongo language and religion have many words relating to the origin of today’s zombie. Most important among these words is “nzambi.” Although spelled differently, the pronunciation is exactly the same as we would say the word “zombie” today. In the Kikongo religion, a nzambi is the spirit of a dead person.
The religions of Central Africa are a beautiful thing. There, once the soul has left the body it is given an option. You can either stay in the invisible plane of the dead where you are still able to live among and interact with the living but cannot be seen; or you can return to your body at any time. To the Kikongo, a resurrection is no miracle. It is an understanding that someone has chosen to return to this physical plane. Thus, a reanimated body that was once “dead” would be the return of one’s nzambi to their physical form.
To the Kongo, our ancestors are always with us. They guide and direct us into our best selves and our best selves. And they are never far, able to be called by us in times of crisis or need. With this understanding, it is easy to see why such a belief would remain strong even as over ten million men, women, and children were being kidnapped and trafficked over the course of 400 years.
The Darkness of Slavery
One of humankind’s most despicable moments was the near half-century of slavery thrust upon the people of Central Africa and surrounding regions. In most cases, innocent people – and even their babies – would be kidnapped, captured, and dragged to slave trade ports of the West Africa “Gold Coast.” From there, ships capable of carrying up to 700 stolen people were eagerly awaiting the arrival of human beings to ship and sell like cattle.
All parties involved in these indescribable acts are guilty. But the African kidnappers were a different kind of evil. Enticed by the riches of European opportunists and thieves, the people of the Benin and Biafra Bights in the modern-day Ghana and Nigeria regions went into the Congo and hunted innocent people whom they then sold to the white man for financial gain. This reality that one’s own neighbor could deceive you and destroy your entire world for their own self-interest led to the creation of the Haitian bokor.
Version Two: The Voodoo Zombie
African slaves ended up in all parts of North and South American and the Caribbean. Oftentimes, African captives merged their cultures with the European ways of their illicit captors. For example, the Gullah people of the Carolinas called up root doctors to invoke spirits in order to protect them from the atrocities of slavery. In Texas, slaves hammered nails into supernaturally inhabited objects to call upon the aid of benevolent spirits. Unfortunately, much more sinister interactions were happening in Haiti.
The atrocities of slavery in Haiti were harsher than other parts of the oppressive world. And that is saying quite a bit considering the regular lynchings and whippings that were happening in the American South. The violence forced upon these workers was oftentimes indescribable. And it was easy for one to believe their capture was due to an evil manipulator out for selfish gain. Enter the evil bokor.
Evil Begets Evil
A bokor is a Voodoo root doctor who can practice either good or evil medicine. Bokors have the ability to communicate with the spirits of the invisible world and therefore claim to know its mysteries. Evil root doctors arriving in Haiti quickly picked up on the control and financial gain that came from holding human beings against their will. And they decided to cash in on the blood money of slavery.
Putting their medicinal knowledge to work, these bokors took to secretly poisoning fellow Haitian slaves. After taking effect, their concoctions that can enter the nervous system through a simple touch would render their victim paralyzed and catatonic for days. Bokor poison also causes the target to breathe at a slower and barely noticeable rate. Appearing dead, the catatonic sufferer would be laid to rest while still alive yet completely incapable of communicating in any way.
After funerary procedures, a bokor would dig up their buried target under the cloak of night and profess to have resurrected them after capturing their spirit as it left the body. Dazed and confused, these victims would suffer a second abuse on top of slavery. They would be gaslighted into believing their soul was now controlled by these bokors and that they would remain slaves for all eternity. Thus, is the birth of the modern zombie as we know it today.
Version Three: The White Zombie
In the first half of the 1900s, white society still held a belief of cultural superiority over other races of the world. And because of this ethnocentricity, they felt perfectly comfortable usurping any other culture’s practices and creations. See rock ‘n roll for one of history’s most egregious appropriations ever. So, it should come as no surprise that it wasn’t long before wealthy people who intentionally removed themselves from the systemic abuses of African slavery were taking vacations to the islands of the Caribbean.
Hollywood Whitesplains Things
Willfully ignorant white American casual travelers came upon the abusive tactics of malicious, predatory bokors while island hopping for relaxation interpreted their practices as the indigenous and uncultured superstitions of simple-minded savages. These cultural intruders found the psychological (and sometimes physical) rape of African slaves so entertaining that Hollywood came calling. And in 1932, White Zombie – one of the most offensively victim-gaming films of all time – was filmed on a lot at Universal Studios and released to the American public.
Fans have been in love with the film for nearly a century and there is no sign of its popularity slowing down anytime soon. One famous appropriator named Rob (known for culturally confiscating and denigrating both Michael Myers and Grandpa Munster) loved the movie so much that he released his own “soundtrack” and even named one of his bands after the flick. What is most disturbing about the film, however, is its plot.
Worse Than Gone with the Wind?
A wealthy (white, of course) plantation owner falls for a young (white) woman after meeting her just one time; no red flags. He then decides to solicit the aid from a (white) sugar cane mill magnate and somehow voodoo doctor(?) to force her into becoming his bride. This plantation owner – and the audience, it seems – has no problem with the fact that the sugar mill magnate has enslaved countless Africans to work his mill for no pay, so ignore that. That doesn’t seem to bother anyone. The real problem, mind you, is figuring out how to release just this single, solitary woman and her alone from the voodoo spell.
Thank goodness for us that killing the voodoo “master” releases the damsel from his spell and into the arms of her loving beau. Happy days. But what about those African zombies, you ask? Were they too freed from their forced servitude? Why, of course not. No longer under his guidance, the savages simply fall off a cliff and no one seems disturbed. Look, the white lady is okay and that’s what matters.
ASSURANCE: YOU CAN RELAX NOW. THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE IS GUARANTEED TO BE ENJOYABLE TO ALL READERS.
Version Four: The Confused Zombie
If White Zombie was a Hollywood blockbuster, then no one should be surprised to learn that screenwriters came up with a whole lot of nonsensical zombie films after the success of that infamous 1932 appropriation. Cashing in like film industry bokors, these Alan Smithees came up with as many different reasons for the undead to come crawling back to life for audiences as marketing agencies came up with health benefits to smoking cigarettes. Zombie plots from the 1930s into the early sixties included zombie entertainers in New York nightclubs, zombie gangsters out to get revenge after getting snuffed out in the electric chair, and Nazi scientists because why not.
Aliens came to Earth to turn people into zombies. Folks were converting into zombies after exposure to atomic blasts in the 50s. Even teenage boys were falling prey to the madness. In one movie, a female scientist captures some youths on her private island and locks them up in cages in her basement as she prepares for them to become her obedient puppets. Okay, that one doesn’t sound too awful. But the point here is that White Zombie not only removed the African origin of zombies, but it also completely bastardized it into senseless absurdity.
Films like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies takes the horror of slavery and turns it into “the world’s first monster musical” that pulls no punches as it flaunts a choreographed blackface dance. And Santo vs the Zombies finds a Mexican luchador face off against an evil scientist and his army of you guessed it… zombies. Even when a movie tries to take the genre back to its roots, they still find a way to have it go so, so wrong. The Dead One brings zombies back to their voodoo roots, only with a white priestess who has black followers assist her in her reanimation rituals that take place in (please, no) the old slave quarters of her family’s New Orleans plantation. Can anyone, anyone at all, get this right?
George A. Romero enters the chat.
Version Five: The Zombie Ghoul
Just when it felt like zombies were going to be forever relegated to a destiny of camp and absurdity, some young content creators and college kids from Pittsburgh put together a film that would catapult the genre to unheard of new heights. If George A. Romero and his writing partner John Russo hadn’t typed up Night of the Living Dead in 1968 it is quite possible that zombies could be as forgotten today as mummies and golems. But there is one problem with their iconic film. The antagonists in the film aren’t zombies; they’re ghouls.
You Read That Correctly
This is one of the most controversial statements one can make, yet here we are making it. Romero himself has admitted that his monsters aren’t zombies and would best be described (as they are actually described in the movie) as ghouls. Night of the Living Dead suggests that a returning probe on its way back from Venus carried an extremely high amount of strange radiation. That probe was intentionally destroyed in space and then the dead started rising. At least one leading scientist claims that there was indeed a correlation between the two events.
At best, these creatures would be just reanimated corpses similar to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster and not zombies. But what exactly is a ghoul? According to ancient Mesopotamian folklore, ghouls are demons that lurk around graveyards and consume human flesh. And, theoretically speaking, the monsters of Romero and Russo more definitively represent those creatures as opposed to captured African zombies forced to a life of subservience. So, the next time you encounter your flesh-eating neighbor, understand that their cannibalism is more akin to their ghoul-like nature.
The Great Argument
Good friends George A. Romero and George Russo could not agree on the direction they wanted to take their fictional ghouls and decided to amicably separate. Romero’s “Dead” sequels would focus on the concept that hell has filled up and dead sinners are returned to earth. Although still ghouls, these beings at least have a spiritual element to them. Russo, on the other hand, doubled down on the original story; and in his “Living Dead” sequels, he blamed reanimations on government collected toxins. Both Romero and Russo agreed that, although their ghouls had different origin stories, they would exist simultaneously in the same cinematic universe.
Interestingly enough, it is Russo’s 1985 “Living Dead” film that introduces the specific consumption of brains that genre fans love today. But it’s the stories of George A. Romero that keep these creatures grounded in their Central African roots. Romero claims he casted black actor Duane Jones on his merits alone, but having an innocent black man shot and silenced by a rural, trigger-happy white man at the end of Night of the Living Dead is much more powerful because of its connotations. Romero’s sequel Dawn of the Dead also includes an early gut-wrenching scene in the minority inhabited projects of New York City. And even the much later Land of the Dead makes sure to keep the early Haitian themes of power and separation relevant.
Version Six: The 21st Century Zombie
Outside of Romero’s works, zombies fell out of popularity for some time. But with the releases of massively popular zombie video games like Resident Evil, House of the Dead, and Area 51 in the late 1990s, these creepers returned to the mainstream. Most works of this era stuck to the theme of reanimated corpses hungry for brains until a unique movie from an unlikely place reinvented the entire genre. Contrary to popular belief, 28 Days Later is not a Sandra Bullock sequel where she returns yet again to rehab. It is, in fact, the film that spawned an entirely new type of monster.
Playing With Fire
28 Days Later starts innocently enough with some British activists freeing really angry monkeys from their laboratory cages. They ignore the pleas of the scientists overseeing the simians and end up getting scratched, bit, and clawed to pieces in a frenzy. It turns out the scientists are injecting their caged monkeys with an experimental “rage” serum and now they’ve been freed to go viral, infecting pretty much all of England. Missing all of this chaos is Academy Award winning actor Cillian Murphy who awakens from a coma post-disaster with a justifiable whole lot of questions.
28 Days Later creates the fast-moving monster, since its villains are infected with a viral infection and are not dead. Their rage also causes them to hunt the uninfected with high speed and vigor. This type of zombie, although completely removed from its African origins, becomes the most popular version of the monster of the 21st century considering widespread diseases like Covid-19 are a very real fear of the times. One fact about these angry mofos is that they are absolutely alive, and they don’t care about your brains. They just want to rip you apart.
Get The Prep Out of Here
A low moment of this 21st century is the rise of misinformation. Think of the information age like an all-you-can-eat buffet of knowledge. Sure, most people will choose wisely. But there will be those who scarf down the artery-clogging comfort food that is “fake news.” Not the kind of fake news that these people buy, but the real fake news that makes up conspiracies, hoaxes, and flat earth ideas (cringe).
These people are called preppers, and they are the worst types to have lingering around during an outbreak. Anyone will tell you that in times of disaster, the best way to survive is by uniting. But not these monkeys. They “stand their ground” and shoot to kill, like that “lawman” who took out Ben in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. These morons think they’ll last, but in reality, they’ll be the first to go. Hollywood catered to these gun shuckers with the nonsensical Zombieland movies.
Isolation, which has never worked in the history of life, motivates the 21st century prepper. Their zombies are somehow fast but… still dead? There is no real explanation as to how the prepper came into being and that doesn’t matter to the social pariahs that love to whack them. Because really all a prepper wants is the “freedom” to kill another human being. A long cry from the origins of the captured spirit zombie centuries ago, prepper zombies are fodder for the worst of society… and, by the way, they don’t exist.
In Conclusion
Hopefully this article helps you better understand your fellow dead walkers and provides you with the ability to make a more informed decision when handling the undead among us. As technology becomes more advanced and artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent, it may only be a matter of time before we see the computer zombie. The computer zombie has been theorized for decades; humans turned thoughtless by their devices, AI taking over in our thoughtless absence. But surely, that won’t happen for some time. So, rest assured and be safe out there.
About the Author:
Joe Deez is the co-host of the globally broadcast “We Live Zombie Carnival” morning radio program on Polaris ZM Radio. He is also an aging Gen X shock jock who just doesn’t understand the world today. You can follow him on Instagram @joedeezcomedy and LinkedIn. Listen to the We Live Zombie Carnival podcast on Spotify, iTunes, and anywhere podcasts are heard.
