Zombies Part 1

ZOMBIES PART 1

I started discussing zombies during my August game giveaway when I showcased zombie/horror survival game Dying Light (a game I’m still playing and am finding to be completely fun and offering a great story). The information about zombies is so interesting I figured a series of blog posts about them and their history would be fun and hopefully interesting for my readers. I’m sure there are a few of you out there.

Humans have had a long fear of the dead. Our knowledge of life has always been shadowed with our question of where we go when we are dead. But one thing is certain, we don’t want the dead to come back to life. So what happens when the dead does return to the living? We don’t know but we can imagine.

Prior to Night of the Living Dead, a low-budget zombie movie by George Romero, humans had a different vision of zombies. Instead of the brain-eating, foot-dragging, mindless nomad, they had more in common with other undead beings such as vampires. In fact, when doing the research, I found zombies were often interchangeable with vampires. But as popular culture does, our views of the two has changed over the years.

So let’s do a little time travel and see what zombies were like before the ghoul (another zombie iteration) of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead changed how we think of zombies.

When compared to vampires, zombies share many similarities. They are both undead, they both seek out the living, and they are both difficult to destroy. And when it comes to destroying zombies, they also share destruction by fire with the vampire. In fact William of Newburgh (1136?-1198?) writes about one zombie (revenant, which we will get to in a later post) being such an annoyance that men dug up the body, dismembered it, and burned it to ash.

But the concept of the zombie goes back even further in history, and a zombie reference is made in the Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2100 BC) by Ishtar. When Ishtar’s request for the gate to be opened goes unanswered she threatens: “…I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors; I will bring up the dead to eat the living; And the dead will outnumber the living…” When we read this passage, we find our modern version of the zombie to be similar to the text—eat the living and outnumber the living. Your run-of-the-mill zombie horde stuff.

In the next post I'll explore zombies and voodoo.