American Zombies: From Haitian Folklore to Pop Culture Horror

The zombie represents a multitude of fears, from the loss of the self to the violence of mindless mobs. Its presence in pop culture has been ubiquitous for the past several decades with the success of zombie franchises like the 28 Days Later trilogy and The Walking Dead and its various spinoffs. 

What does our continuing fascination with the shambling undead say about us? Let’s explore the history of zombie folklore and its place in pop culture to see how this menacing monster has changed with the times, and what it reveals about the society that spawned it. 

Caribbean Roots

The term zombie or zombi originates from Haitian folklore, where it refers to a person whose soul has been taken over by a sorcerer who then controls the body, often for the purpose of making it work on a plantation. In this tradition, which is derived from various cultures of central and west Africa, each person has two souls, one which governs thought and individuality, and one that is a kind of guardian spirit. 

In Haitian Vodun lore, there are two types of zombies: zombies of the body, and zombies of the spirit. Most accounts are about the first type, said to be created when a person is buried and then resurrected when their name is called. Sometimes the victim is said to be immobilized and placed in a deathlike state by “zombie powders” containing psychoactive substances. 

The zombie is an obvious metaphor for the horrors of slavery; however, the idea predates the arrival of enslaved people in the Caribbean. Various beliefs about zombies, such as the idea that they can be revived if given salt to eat, speak with nasal voices, and hate the color red, are derived from African folklore.

The Zombie Goes Hollywood

So, how did the zombie of folk tradition become the brains-obsessed ghoul of modern pop culture? The evolution was a gradual one. The first zombie movies centered on the original Caribbean lore the creatures first emerged from. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that zombies as we know them today made their first appearance on the big screen.

White Zombie (1932)

Horror legend Bela Lugosi stars in this independent zombie film shot in just eleven days of night shoots. In it, he plays a Vodou master who sets his sights on the beautiful Madeleine (Madge Bellamy), transforming her into a zombie as well as ensnaring dozens of zombies to work in his sugarcane mill. The film cashed in on public curiosity about Haitian zombie stories, cementing the lore in the minds of American moviegoers.

I Walked with a Zombie (1942) 

This low-budget chiller follows a Canadian nurse who takes a job looking after the wife of a Caribbean sugar plantation owner, only to experience the horror of zombism firsthand. It makes up for its shoestring budget with plenty of creepy atmosphere, and its treatment of both Vodou tradition and the legacy of slavery is surprisingly sensitive for the time. Although it was panned by critics on its initial release, it’s now considered a horror classic.

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

This film, based on Robert Mathieson’s novel I Am Legend, is about the lone survivor (played by Vincent Price) of a plague that has turned everyone else into mindless vampire-like revenants. The idea of loneliness or alienation is a major fear explored in zombie media–after all, it tends to center on lone protagonists fighting mobs of creatures that look human, but no longer are. Although the monsters are based on vampire lore, the fact that there are hoards of undead creatures spreading infection by biting makes them some of cinema’s most prominent proto-zombies.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Pittsburgh filmmaker George A. Romero introduced our modern concept of the zombie as a reanimated corpse that craves human flesh and infects people by biting them with his classic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. (Interestingly, the characters in the movie never say the z-word; the zombies are referred to as “ghouls.”)

In the film, a small group of survivors find themselves in an abandoned house in the midst of a sudden zombie apocalypse. They’re forced to work together to fortify the house and get through the night alive, but tensions are high, and their disagreements turn deadly. Night of the Living Dead is notable for having a Black main character (played by Duane Jones), and the images of him being menaced by a mindless white mob are especially resonant considering the film was made at the tail end of the Civil Rights era. The film’s shocking ending when [spoilers] he is shot by police while trying to get help is still sadly relevant more than 50 years later.

Night was shot on black and white film and clearly made on a shoestring budget, but its eerie imagery, social commentary, and iconic lines like “They’re coming to get you, Barbraaaa” made it a cult classic. Because of an error when titling the original film, Romero never copyrighted his breakout movie, and it ended up in heavy rotation on late night television and then home video throughout the 70s and 80s, where it inspired a new generation of horror fanatics. 

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Romero’s next foray into the world of zombies was 1978’s Dawn of the Dead. This time, the survivors gathered in a shopping mall to make their last stand, leading to darkly comedic sequences of shambling zombies bumping into mannequins and racks of clothes, a not-so-subtle commentary on American consumerism. 

Dawn is a much bigger and flashier movie than Night, but its themes of humanity banding together to survive (or not) are still front and center. Romero’s politics heavily inform his zombie films, from the social commentary of Night to Dawn’s anti-consumerist messaging.

28 Days Later (2002)

At the dawn of the 21st century, everything felt like it was suddenly moving at hyperspeed, and the dead were no exception. British filmmaker Danny Boyle introduced the concept of fast zombies in this haunting, high-tension 2002 film that follows a group of survivors fleeing London by car as they try to locate the source of a mysterious broadcast that offers the “answer to infection.” 

The zombies in this franchise have been infected with a rage virus that functions a bit like rabies, causing them to viciously attack anything that moves. If there’s one thing scarier than a horde of zombies shuffling and moaning, it’s seeing them running at you at full speed. The first film in the franchise contrasts fast-paced action scenes with more lyrical explorations of a world suddenly devoid of humanity, forcing viewers to slow down and take in the eerie quiet.

Resident Evil (2002)

The Resident Evil franchise of videogames and the series of middling action movies they inspired don’t exactly reinvent the wheel when it comes to the walking dead; however, they do introduce an interesting concept for zombie media to chew on: the evils of big business. In this franchise, the evil Umbrella Corporation is responsible for the outbreak of zombism in Raccoon City, and their nefarious experiments have created all manner of horrors, from mutant zombie dogs to hulking giants. 

Zombie Spoofs

After decades of walking corpses terrifying movie audiences, it was inevitable that filmmakers would want to poke fun at them. By the mid-2000s, zombie media was so ubiquitous that it was ripe for parody, and directors were ready to spoof the genre. Here are a few movies that generate laughs alongside the familiar zombie scares.

Shaun of the Dead (2005)

In this comedy by British filmmaker Edgar Wright, two London slackers face the zombie apocalypse the same way as every other problem: they go to the pub. With a great roster of character actors and a memorable use of a record collection, this movie asks the immortal question: “Why is Queen still on?!”

Zombieland (2009)

Jesse Eisenberg stars in this zombie comedy from Ruben Fleischer that’s part road movie, part romance, and tons of fun. Featuring a plucky turn from Emma Stone and a fun cameo from Bill Murray playing himself, it’s light, frothy and endlessly watchable.

Fido (2006)

Set in an alternate universe 1950s where zombies have been domesticated, this weirdly heartwarming Canadian satire centers on a boy named Timmy and his new pet zombie, Fido (Billy Connolly). As Timmy battles bullies and a burgeoning suburban zombie outbreak, his bond with Fido proves to be his saving grace. Equally charming and gory, Fido is a fresh take on the zombie genre that makes the most of its outlandish premise.

Zombie Fears 

The zombie is a multivalent monster. It represents a huge variety of fears that are endemic to modern life. From social contagion to literal pandemics, zombies speak to our deepest anxieties. Here are a few of the deep, dark fears the undead can drag into the light.

Zombies as Plague

As Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz explain in their article “Infection, Media, and Capitalism: From Early Modern Plagues to Postmodern Zombies,” writings expressing fear of infection “have simultaneously operated as expressions of of otherwise largely unspoken anxieties arising in response to the interconnected changes wrought by the onset of modernity generally and the spread of capitalism specifically” (127). 

They begin by talking about English plague narratives from the early modern era, when society underwent a rapid shift from feudalism to a more recognizably modern form of capitalism, but the same is true of our modern obsession with the walking dead. The plague of zombism is a sweeping change that upends the social order. 

This quote from the article explains the link between contagion and capitalism as Boluk and Lenz see it:

The threat the zombie poses is an exaggerated threat of the dismantling of social and economic institutions brought on by plague. Just as plague has a polysemic rhetorical structure in which it expresses cultural contradictions, so too does the zombie express these conflicted anxieties toward the virality of contemporary late capital. The capitalist position is that capitalism solves the problems it creates: that capitalism entails its own solution. The Marxian argument is that capitalism leads to the end of capitalism—that it entails its own demise. These competing theories of economic history—one static, the other dialectical—are embodied in the eschatological implications of the zombie. (136)

What this means is that the zombie embodies the contradictions of late capitalism (such as its rapacious appetite in a world of finite resources) through a potent metaphor of plague. Whether the disease ultimately consumes the entire population and dies out or gets contained by the survivors who create a new world from the ashes, it has laid bare the foundations of society. In a world still recovering from the shock of COVID, the zombie as an expression of plague fears and societal inequality is more relevant than ever.

The Fear of the Mob

In a nation with a history of mob violence, this fear is deep and resonant. Zombies represent groups of people bent on mindless destruction, and the visual they present is one of a hoard coming toward you, whether running at full speed or shambling as slow and inexorable as the tide.

Romero first tapped into this primal fear in Night of the Living Dead, where his zombies called to mind the racialized mob violence of the Jim Crow era. Like zombies, mobs are both mindless and merciless, and the idea of a crazed mob trying to break into your house is terrifying even if they aren’t after your brains.

Some of the most persistent imagery in zombie media is the horde of “walkers” moving endlessly forward, creating a wall of flesh that seems impossible to defeat. One zombie isn’t particularly scary on its own, but hundreds or thousands is a different story. 

The Zombie as Other

Another fear that the zombie taps into is a xenophobic fear of the Other. As Johannes Fehrle explains in his article “‘Zombies Don’t Recognize Borders’: Capitalism, Ecology, and Mobility in the Zombie Outbreak Narrative,” zombie media draws on a “politics of fear” (528), excavating society’s buried anxieties. As he says:

Many of the fears expressed through zombies are tied to questions of movement and mobility. Since the zombie genre is so centrally concerned with questions of borders, boundaries, and the attempt to prohibit the movement of infected people into certain areas, it can be brought to resonate in an increasingly globalized world in which a paradox exists between the attempt to minimize the restrictions imposed on the movement of goods through free trade agreements on the one hand, and the regulation of the mobility of people, on the other. (528)

In our current political landscape of rampant anti-immigrant sentiment, it’s hard not to read the images of terrifying hordes associated with zombie films as representations of mass migration. (Also, it’s probably not a coincidence that there was an explosion of zombie media in the xenophobic post-9/11 era.)

The zombie apocalypse, as a subset of outbreak fears, Fehrle argues, expresses “a realization of the increasing instability of borders, be they national, physical, or social” (528). Fehrle uses the 2013 Brad Pitt vehicle World War Z to examine this aspect of zombie media. In the film, the global scale of the outbreak is emphasized, and it must be contained with “the go-to solution of American masculinity, metaphorized in the global action of U.S.-led military/humanitarian intervention and embodied by Brad Pitt's character as the lone hero and protector of femininity, family, and an ethnically-marked Other” (529). Fehrle is referring to Pitt’s character adopting the son of a Mexican family who took his family in when the boy’s parents are later killed, an assimilationist fantasy that contrasts the “dangers of (the wrong kind of) migration” (540).

As this example shows, zombies are intimately connected with fears of social contagion, the breakdown of boundaries, and the unrestricted movement of “undesirable” populations.

The Ultimate Consumer

The zombie is a great metaphor for mass consumption because they are nothing but consumers–they have no higher functions and simply shuffle around on the hunt for brains. Zombies are “pure desiring machines” (Boluk and Lenz 136) incapable of doing anything but want, and never satisfied no matter how much they consume.

This metaphor is made explicit with Romero’s mall-walking dead in Dawn of the Dead, but it also appears in other zombie media. In the 2005 Edgar Wright film Shaun of the Dead, Shaun sees zombies wandering the aisles of his local convenience store, almost indistinguishable from how they had behaved in life. 

The Loss of Self

From the original zombies of Caribbean folklore to modern images of shambling corpses, this fear is perhaps the greatest throughline in zombie lore. Losing your sense of individuality and becoming part of a mindless collective is one of the most terrifying aspects of zombism. Zombies have no free will, no capacity for thought–everything human in them has died, but the body remains. 

As Denise M. Cook notes in “The Cultural Life of the Living Dead,” “If the soul is what makes us human, zombie life is a separation from our humanity” (56). Zombie fiction such as Night of the Living Dead often emphasizes the need for cooperation and community among the survivors to help each other get through the horrors alive. Rather than losing their humanity before the zombies even show up, they have to lift each other up and work together. 

Inversion of Nature

There is perhaps no more powerful image for the natural world being amiss than the dead walking the earth. This can be seen in the various fictional causes of zombism, which is often caused by scientific experiments gone wrong, as in the Resident Evil and 28 Days Later franchises. One thing’s for sure: when you tamper in God’s domain, there are often consequences.

Zombie horror is often wrapped up in ecological ideas, as the zombie infection is figured as a kind of pollution, a corruption of the environment. Desert wastelands and other desolate landscapes are popular settings for stories about the walking dead, emphasizing the isolation and hopelessness of the protagonists.

At the same time, these stories also offer a window on a world without humanity (or at least, very much of it). In 28 Days Later, for example, the survivors discover eerily quiet landscapes, desolate highways, and spaces being reclaimed by nature. Part of the horror of these narratives is the idea of mankind disappearing with only ruins left behind.

Conclusion

Although it has its roots in hundreds of years of Caribbean folklore, the zombie as we know it is a creature of the late 20th century, expressing fears associated with modernity that have only grown more virulent with the passing decades. Fears of infection, migration, and rampant consumerism all fuel our obsession with zombie media. 

With the recent success of 28 Years Later and The Last of Us, it seems the walking dead are here to stay. As we continue to grapple with a rapidly changing world, we’ll keep turning to zombies–avatars of catastrophic change that sweeps away the foundations of society–to express our anxieties. As long as the modern world remains a scary place, we’ll be processing our fears with the help of cinema’s favorite ghouls.

Works Cited

Hans-W. Ackerman & Jeanine Gauthier, “The Ways and Nature of the Zombi,” The Journal of American Folklore 104.414 (1991): 466-94.

Denise N. Cook, “The Cultural Life of the Living Dead,” Contexts 12.4 (2013): 54-56.

Stephanie Boluk & Wylie Lenz, “Infection, Media, and Capitalism: From Early Modern Plagues to Postmodern Zombies,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10.2 (2010): 126-47.

Johannes Fehrle, “Zombies Don’t Recognize Borders’: Capitalism, Ecology, and Mobility in the Zombie Outbreak Narrative,” American Studies 61.4 (2016): 527-44.