The Undead Origins of the Zombie Movie

Zombies are a recurring theme in movies – and on television. From George Romero’s classic horror-fest, Night of the Living Dead, to the ever-popular, The Walking Dead series, we all love a good movie populated with shuffling, brain-munching zombies.

Zombies aren’t terribly intelligent, but killing them requires imagination and a strong stomach. Some zombie movies are truly scary (Dawn of the Dead) whereas others are funny and touching in equal measure (Zombieland and Warm Bodies). All three have been voted the best zombie movies on Netflix.

But, where did the zombie genre spawn from? Let’s find out!

Zombies are reanimated corpses and their origins can be traced back to Haiti where local people believed the dead could be brought back to life with a voodoo spell. Not surprisingly, it didn’t take long for moviemakers to spot a theme their audiences would love.

Early Zombies

One of the earliest zombie movies was White Zombie (1932), starring that stalwart of horror movies, Bela Lugosi. The theme proved popular and by the 1950s, there was a whole stable of zombie movies featuring villainous characters in charge of zombie hordes. Inevitably, they usually got their just deserts by the closing credits.

Early zombies were little more than mute, shuffling corpses. Unlike the zombies of today’s cinema, most of them were too dull-witted to be dangerous. It wasn’t until George A. Romero turned the whole genre on its head that zombies entered an apocalyptic universe and transformed into dangerous predators.

Enter the Living Dead

Unlike the zombies from early movies, Romero’s undead were insatiable and ravenous for human flesh. The only thing that could kill them was catastrophic damage to their grey matter. A zombie contagion was also contagious, so if you were bitten by the undead, you became one of them.

We are all familiar with these rules, but before Night of the Living Dead, zombie movies were not that gory or violent. Now, if a zombie movie doesn’t show someone having their brains eaten or other scenes of explicit gore, it is considered rather tame. Imagine an episode of the Walking Dead with all the extreme violence cut out – would it be so popular? Perhaps not.

Gut Churning Gore

Directors have increasingly tested the limits of what an audience can stomach over the years. The season seven opening episode of The Walking Dead was the show’s bloodiest ever, but it is not always about the gore. Often, zombie movies are satirical, humorous, and with strong social messages woven up in the plot.

Many zombie movies explore ‘end of the world’ apocalyptic themes, most notably 28 Days Later and World War Z. Virus-riddled undead corpses feed into our fear of a global pandemic breaking down the structure of modern civilization and pushing humanity to the brink.

Ultimately, though, zombie movies are great escapism. With the news full of stories of real horror, at least in the movies, it is possible to kill the enemy with a well-placed shot or a clean swipe of a sharp machete. The good people always survive a zombie massacre, which is often not the case in real life.