Reanimated corpses were not exactly new to film when Night of the Living Dead premiered in the late 1960s. The Plague of Zombies was released by Hammer Pictures in 1966, and the representation of a somnambulist or sleepwalker first appeared on celluloid in the German picture The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Caligari paralleled Haitian zombie lore with an individual under someone else’s control. Although not technically a zombie, they had a lumbering gait and lack of cognitive ability. But it is the visual performances and tropes, like humans being trapped by a horde of zombies, borne from Night of the Living Dead, that have spawned everything from the movie Night of the Comet (1984) to the television series The Walking Dead (2010–present).
While George Romero refined the zombie genre in film, the concept of the undead has existed in numerous cultures for ages. References to zombie-like creatures date back as far as the writings of Gilgamesh in 2100 BCE. The Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia is considered to be the oldest surviving work of literature. It contains the haunting warning “the dead go up to eat the living! And the dead will outnumber the living!” This is strikingly similar to the well-known quote from 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, “when there’s no room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth!” In China, the undead were known as the jiang shi. These creatures killed people in order to steal their life force, or qi. This lore dates back to the Qing Dynasty and the scholar Ji Xiaolan. He cited various reasons for bodies coming back to life including possession or a person’s soul not leaving their body. There was even the belief that if a pregnant cat leapt across your coffin you would be zombified! In Scandinavia the myth of draugr dates back to the eighth century. The draugr were believed to rise up from the dead to guard the treasures in their graves. And in twelfth century England, regarded historian William Newburgh wrote of “corpses [that] come out of their graves.”
Most modern horror movies trace their version of the undead to folklore revolving around the religion of voodoo in the country of Haiti. Voodoo folklore views zombies as bodies without souls. For one to become a zombie, “zombification” must occur. A sorcerer, or boko, performs a spell on a person to kill, enslave, or sicken them. They may perhaps use poisonous powders such as frog or toad venom and tetrodotoxin, a powerful neurotoxin that is secreted by puffer fish. This toxin can trigger paralysis or death-like symptoms and cause others to believe the person is dead. Other steps in the zombification process include keeping the ti-bon anj, the manifestation of awareness and memory, in a special bottle. The zombie will remain a slave to the sorcerer until the bottle is broken or the zombie ingests salt or meat.
In 2014, George Romero spoke to NPR’s Arun Rath about the inspiration behind his zombie franchise.1 He explained that he “grew up on classic movie monsters” and never dreamed he would be the father of the modern-day zombie, “I never expected it. I really didn’t, all I did was I took them out of ‘exotica’ and I made them the neighbors ... I thought there’s nothing scarier than the neighbors!” Although Romero’s film went on to earn $12 million at the box office (two hundred and fifty times its modest budget) years before Kelly and I (Meg) were born, both of us have had our own personal experience with this groundbreaking horror film. Kelly remembers a Christmas morning when she unwrapped a VHS copy of Night of the Living Dead, a special gift from her father. It was the first horror movie she ever watched, ultimately the catalyst in sparking her adoration for all things spooky. Meg fell in love with the film’s sequel, Dawn of the Dead, before she laid eyes on the original. Dawn of the Dead holds much of the same charm as its predecessor, yet with a bigger budget, therefore a more ambitious representation of zombie carnage. A decade later, Romero was able to add a greenish pallor to his zombies as well as a neon red blood to the victims. This undoubtedly upped the horror ante.
More than fifty years later, the legacy of Night of the Living Dead continues. Zombies have been inculcated into the cultural zeitgeist alongside vampires and slashers. The concept of reanimation, and the ultimate betrayal of a family member or friend coming back from the dead to snack on your brain, still terrifies. Although, now that many of us have become more sophisticated in our viewership, quite a few have come to complain about the inconsistencies of body decomposition in zombie films and television. One target of this social media murmur is the aforementioned AMC hit The Walking Dead. Fans on Twitter and beyond began to ask if the show was accurately representing how a body would decompose over time. In 2015, MTV News even interviewed forensic anthropologist, Kimberlee Moran, to explain the body decomposition on the popular TV series. Moran describes that the zombies on the series “would have all kinds of parts of their body dropping off of them all the time, until they become a skeleton.”2 To further our understanding of how real bodies would act under the extreme and thankfully unreal affliction of zombification, we interviewed a medical expert about death and the body decomposition in George Romero’s first two films—someone Meg and I (Kelly) both know (who hides his eyes while watching horror movies and even screams at the frightening scenes!)—Meg’s husband, Dr. Luke Hafdahl, an internal medicine physician at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic.
Meg: “In horror films, including Night of the Living Dead, we see actors ‘die.’ Can you tell us how a body reacts to death in its immediate stages?”
Dr. Hafdahclass="underline" “Generally speaking, when someone is dying, there are two roads to death. Most people simply become withdrawn, lethargic, and eventually comatose. They stop speaking. Their breathing becomes altered and, often, you can hear a sound called the ‘death rattle,’ a rattling sound in the chest that comes from vibrating secretions. People’s fingers become blue from lack of blood flow.
The other road to death is less common but much more dramatic, called ‘terminal delirium,’ in which people become agitated, confused, hallucinate, restless, and begin having involuntary muscle jerks. When people die, the color immediately drains from their face and they develop an ashen appearance. Still, it can be hard to judge if they are alive without checking for a pulse.”
Meg: “Well, I guess that explains that pale zombie pallor!”
Kelly: “Are there any diseases or conditions that make someone seem as if they are dead?”
Dr. Hafdahclass="underline" “One of the more terrifying syndromes is called pseudocoma or locked-in syndrome in which someone has a stroke in their brainstem in such a way that their consciousness is preserved (they are completely aware of everything) but they lose their ability to move their limbs, speak, and swallow. They can communicate only by blinking or moving their eyes up and down (they often cannot move their eyes from side to side).”
Kelly: “That is zombie like, not having control over your own body.”