The zombie has come a long way from the mindless, shuffling corpses in Night of the Living Dead . Here's a look at the journey from the origin of the species to Warm Bodies .
1932-1967: Classic beginnings
In the 1943 film I Walked With a Zombie, Betsy (Frances Dee) and the zombie Jessica (Christine Gordon) come face-to-face with Voodoo in the form of the Carre-Four (Darby Jones).
In the beginning, zombies in film reflected traditional Haitian mythology: they were the reanimated dead, toiling under the control of a Voodoo master. They were not hungry for flesh or brains — in fact, they had no motivation outside of following their master's orders.
Even early on, however, cinema decided to tweak things a little. The first feature-length zombie film, 1932's White Zombie, introduced the idea of Voodoo possession of a living person: the result was a mindless being, but one who could ostensibly be cured (to varying degrees of success). The 1943 film I Walked With a Zombie picks up on this. Ultimately, its zombie is ambiguous: is Jessica actually a zombie, or merely afflicted with tropical fever?
The modern zombie has little association with these early films: the Haitian mythology got dropped entirely in favor of the more popular virus explanation. But it's worth noting that the classic zombie movies of the '30s and '40s did introduce the idea of the zombie as a living person. This put them more in line with humans under a vampire's thrall (see 1931's Dracula) rather than simply dead people crawling out of the earth.
1968-1984: George A. Romero makes his mark
The zombies shuffle forward in Night of the Living Dead (1968). Praised by many as the greatest zombie film of all time, George A. Romero's classic set the stage for all future zombie flicks.
The modern zombie film owes an incalculable debt to George A. Romero, who reinvented the genre with Night of the Living Dead in 1968. The look and feel of the zombie is based on Romero's model — not to mention that persistent hunger for flesh. These were zombies as antagonists.
To be fair, there were predecessors. Romero based his zombies in part on the creatures in the novel I Am Legend, though those were closer to vampires in nature. (The adaptations of the book — The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man, and I Am Legend — have offered various interpretations.) Romero also never used the word "zombie" in the script, instead employing the term "ghoul." In later interviews, he began referring to his creatures as "zombies."
Outside of the zombies themselves, one of the most important innovations introduced by Night of the Living Dead was the idea of zombie as social commentary. The hero of the film is Ben (Duane Johnson), a Black man described in the script as "comparatively calm and resourceful Negro." Despite staving off the zombie horde, Ben is gunned down by fellow humans who mistake him for a zombie, a reflection on contemporary race relations. Romero's 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead was a satire on consumer culture.
