Fans of the undead can hardly wait, because The Walking Dead, US TV’s highest-rated scripted drama, returns again this autumn for another season of grim survival amidst the zombie apocalypse. The series has proved so popular that there is now a spin-off series, Fear the Walking Dead, which just had the highest rated premiere in US cable TV history. The seventh Resident Evil film is due next year and even if the movie is subtitled The Final Chapter, one thing we know about the zombies is that they have the habit of always coming back. We are not done with this creature yet.
Where did all this come from? It is common to trace the contemporary zombie back to George Romero’s 1968 B-movie shocker, Night of the Living Dead. In fact, that film never uses the z-word and was a very loose adaptation of Richard Matheson’s vampire novel, I Am Legend, where the last human alive attempts to find a cure for the vampire virus. Histories of the zombie film always suggest a beginning further back, in Victor Halperin’s White Zombie, which first appeared in 1932 within months of Universal Studios’ famous adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula. In White Zombie there are lots of laborious explanations of the zombie for the American audience because it transports into the popular culture a set of beliefs from Haiti and the French Antilles in the Caribbean. Today’s zombie is the result of the translation of this exotic zombie from the colonial margins to the imperial centre.
There is some speculation that the word derives from West African languages – ndzumbi means ‘corpse’ in the Mitsogo language of Gabon, and nzambi means the ‘spirit of a dead person’ in the Kongo language. These were the areas where European slavers forcibly transported vast numbers of the population across the Atlantic to work in the sugar cane plantations of the West Indies, the vast profits of which motored the rise of France and England to world powers. The Africans took their religion with them. However, French law required slaves to convert to Catholicism. What emerged was a series of elaborate synthetic religions, creatively mixing elements of different traditions: Vodou or Voodoo in Haiti, Obeah in Jamaica, Santeria in Cuba.
