How the Zombie Got Its Bite
Zombies first shambled onto the silver screen in 1932, with the release of White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi. The movie was based on The Magic Island, the sensational book on Haitian folklore by noted sadist and sometime cannibal William Seabrook. As dramatic as it was, Seabrook’s novel was honest in its depiction of zombies as victims, “demented human beings, idiots, forced to toil in the fields”. Seabrook noted that Haitians were not scared of zombies, who they considered docile and easily subdued, but of being turned into a zombie.
Faithful to that premise, the zombie of White Zombie is heroine Madeline Short, entranced by the lecherous Murder Legendre. “She was not alive nor dead,” ran the salacious tagline, “just a white zombie performing his every desire!”. Although Short is poisoned and appears to fall dead, it is a ruse by Legendre to separate her from her fiancé. Once Legendre is killed in the climactic scene, the spell is broken, and Short remains very much alive.
So how did the dumb, domesticated zombie of historic lore mutate into the ferocious cannibal that terrifies moviegoers to this day? The answer lies in one well-known film, and the actions of an unknown marketer, who accidentally created one of cinema’s most popular and versatile monsters.
In 1968, George Romero released his monster movie. Shot in black and white, it features one night in the life of a group of survivors besieged in a farmhouse against a band of mute, murderous ghouls raised from the dead. Romero was inspired by I Am Legend, the vampire novel by Richard Matheson, in which the last man left of Earth is locked in battle with the remaining population, all of whom had been turned into vampires. Romero liked the book, and thought it would be interesting to tell the story of the beginning of this outbreak, rather than the end.
The word “zombie” never appears in Night Of The Living Dead, because it was not meant to be a zombie film
The film he produced, Night Of The Flesh Eaters, features ghouls which bear a strong similarity to the monsters of Matheson’s vision. The creatures are active during the night, unthinking, eat human flesh, and most importantly, their bite confers a sickness which eventually turns the victim into a ghoul like themselves.
Walter Reade, the distribution company, liked the film but didn’t like the title. So they rebranded the movie Night Of The Living Dead. (In doing so they forgot to add a copyright mark to the new title card, which forfeited the movie to the public domain — a mistake which contributed no small part to its success.) The phrase “living dead” was already associated with zombies rather than vampires, and so Night Of The Living Dead became known as a zombie movie. This is the reason why the word “zombie” never appears in Night Of The Living Dead — it was not meant to be a zombie film. If you ever felt zombies were just dressed down vampires, it’s because they are.
The change did something incredible to zombies: it gave them a new biology and separated them from their magical trappings. No longer would a voodoo sorcerer need to apply his poisons and spells to individual victims to raise an army of zombies. Instead, they would spread virally, by bite, without a master to control them. This lack of purpose is probably what makes the new zombies so much more frightening than their forebears. As a force, they can no longer be returned to normal, or negotiated with, or overcome. And without any need for a master or voodoo, Romero’s zombies could crop up anywhere, prompted by anything, be it radiation, aliens, chemical weapons, parasitic worms, viruses, sonic waves; they were amendable to whatever society’s current fears were, a blank slate for our anxieties.
Today, zombies remain very much at the top of the food chain, easily outselling Hollywood’s other monsters (including their genetic ancestors, the vampire), and outcompeting them for presence on every entertainment platform you care to mention. Once victims of human malevolence, it’s now the zombies who have us under their spell.
For more facts about zombies, check out my book, How To Make A Zombie
