Despite their repetitive growls and flesh-eating, we want more of them
All of Us Are Dead had us hooked with its new-ish spin on zombies- the quarantine, masking, testing, and mutations were all too familiar for the viewers. Zombies in media folklore, much like their undead selves, have continued to endure, but have you ever wondered what its legacy is? And where did it all start?
The zombie owes its origins to the enslaved in Haiti in the 1700s. In the early 18th century when the French colonised West Africa, they sent the enslaved to Haiti to work on the plantations. The Haitian believed that death would release them back to Lan Guinee, an afterlife where they could be free. However, if someone died by suicide, they would remain trapped in their soulless bodies. According to Professor Amy Wilentz of the University of California “Suicide was the their only way to take control over his or her body…And yet the fear of becoming a zombie might stop them from doing so. This final rest in green, leafy, heavenly Africa with no sugarcane to cut and no master to appease or serve — is unavailable to the zombie. To become a zombie was a their worst nightmare: To be dead and still a slave, an eternal field hand.”
After the end of French colonialism and America’s occupation of Haiti in 1915, the zombie became part of Haiti’s popular folklore, coalescing into the region’s Voodoo religion. The word zombie itself derives from West African languages, since ndzumbi means corpse in Mitsogo language of Gabon and nzambi means spirit of a dead person in Kongo language. Zombies were then first introduced to the American consciousness via Wiliam Seabrook’s travel book The Magic Island, in which he recounts voodoo rituals he encountered in Haiti in 1929. And in 1932, the first feature length zombie movie White Zombie was released. Directed by Victor Haleperin, the film centers around the male lead asking for help from a sorcerer to win the love of a woman, that is until the woman becomes a zombie.
White Zombie was followed by a few more zombie films, but it was George A Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead in 1968 that was a game changer. The film featuring undead people who feasted on human flesh and had descended on a town in Pennsylvania, is regarded as the first modern zombie film, so we have Romero to thank for establishing the zombie prototype in movies. Romero redefined the notion of zombies, stripping them off their history of slavery and cultural specificity. The zombies became reanimated dead corpses that arose out of nowhere, either as a fluke and in recent films due to a nuclear spill or a new virus. And this is where Romero’s ability to completely post modernise the zombie is crucial, since it allowed several filmmakers from around the world to latch innumerable meanings and connotations to a zombie-anybody can become a zombie and anybody can be attacked by a zombie.
After Night of the Living Dead, it is fairly easy to draw a timeline of the ebb and flow of zombie films in popular media, prominently films like Dawn of the Dead (1978), Re-animator (1985) and even in Michael Jackson’s music video Thriller (1983). And how can one forget The Walking Dead, a whole zombie universe consisting of films, TV shows, comic books and video games. Zombies got a further makeover due to video games such as Resident Evil and House of the Dead, which also contributed to the adaptation of zombies in Asian cinema. Zombies were often a metaphor for trauma and dehumanisation and this is when the 2016 South Korean film Train to Busan heralded another transformation of the zombie figure-as a figure emblematic of social inequalities.
Although zombies had made sporadic appearances in South Korean films, it was not until early 21st century with the release of films Dark Forest (2006) and The Neighbour Zombie (2009) that piqued popular interest in zombies. The Neighbour Zombie can be regarded as the film that brought into mainstream themes and motifs that have become recurrent in zombie films and TV shows of South Korea. The film consists of six stories with the outbreak of the zombie virus in Seoul being the common plot. For instance, the fourth film is about a scientist who works for a corporation from where the virus got leaked, but on developing the vaccine he escapes since the corporation wants to have sole ownership of the vaccine.
Similarly, the 2021 Korean drama Happiness also features a plot where the zombie virus is caused due to a failed drug release and takes place in post-Covid world. The drama deviates from the slasher zombie trope as well since the infected people are depicted as intermittently showing violent and human flesh-eating symptoms. When not displaying symptoms, the infected behave normally, which is in contrast to how most zombies are understood to have a permanent condition. This is where the drama succeeds in humanising the zombie, slivers of which we see in All Of Us Are Dead as well since season one ends with a cliffhanger of people with a virus mutation, yet capable of holding conversations with fellow humans (the 2019 Korean drama Kingdom, although set in the Joseon period, also depicts an unfolding zombie plague and the quest to find a cure for it).
In the Indian context, zombie horror films have been a bit of a hit and miss and most seem to be inspired by Hollywood films. There has been a slew of Tamil and Telugu zombie films in the past six years, and amongst Hindi films, Go Goa Gone was a surprise hit. The 2013 film is a horror comedy (the film’s director duo have to their credit another hit film, Stree) where the zombie outbreak is caused due to a new drug at a rave party in Goa.
The zombies of Haiti were representative of the anxieties of slavery, and now devoid of its connection to enslaved Haitians, zombies have become a portmanteau. On several occasions they have represented capitalism to fear of nuclear war, symbolising economic inequality and police brutality and the current theme of an apocalypse where a global pandemic turns humans into zombies. Zombies thus remain undead because they have taken a permanent allegorical position in popular media as a vehicle for people’s modern anxieties and apocalyptic fears.
Perhaps not too many years from now we will get to see zombies who are AI-powered or a metaverse being attacked by zombies!
Anubhanama is a monthly Film & TV column by Anubha Sarkar who unpacks popular culture through a social, political and historical lens. If you have any suggestions for her, you can write them to us on contact@southasiantoday.com.au