Video Essay Examines The History of Zombies
I’ve got a fun and interesting video essay here for you to watch today from Evan Puschak aka The Nerdwriter that examines the history of zombies. It starts out with zombism’s Haitian Voodoo origins and how zombies came into existence:
“The zombie, they say, is the soulless human corpse still dead but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life. The zombies of Haitian folklore are controlled by a sorcerer called a bokor who uses them for his own ends often for menial work resembling the slave labor and by the way, they don’t eat or crave human flesh at this point.”
The video then goes into how the concept of zombies changed with Hollywood and movies, specifically George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I will note, though, that Romero referred to these characters as ghouls rather than zombies, but he was calling them zombies in his next film:
“Once in the popular imagination, it took only three years for this conception of the zombie to find its way to Hollywood to a film industry eager for another monster after the successes of Dracula and Frankenstein…Romero changed the rules first…”
Check out the video below and maybe you’ll learn something new about zombies today.