Shawn McIntosh

The Evolution of the Zombie: The Monster That Keeps Coming Back

They have appeared in the steamy jungles of Haiti, on

the dry plains of Transvaal, in Welsh tin mines, underwater,

and in space. They have shuffled onto the silver screen, the

Broadway stage, video games, and annually on the streets of

Manhattan, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. They have shown

up in computer lingo and philosophical treatises on the

nature of consciousness. Zombies, it seems, are everywhere.

Few monster types have embedded themselves in the

popular imagination as thoroughly as zombies have, even

though zombies are often upstaged by the flashier monster

types such as vampires, Frankenstein’s monster, and

fantastic science-fiction creatures. However, their

plodding, “never say die” quality is one reason among

several that they have managed to endure as frightening

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monsters when other traditional monster types that scared

past generations have largely been defanged on the covers of

children’s cereal boxes or relegated to Saturday afternoon

television reruns and self-conscious spoofs.

In post-9/11 America zombies have made a comeback, with

some film scholars even calling the steady rise of zombie

movies every year since 2002 a “zombie renaissance” in film

and popular culture.1 This paper outlines how zombies have

evolved as a popular monster type in film and how certain

characteristics of zombies as monsters have proven them to

be remarkably versatile as reflections of a wide range of

cultural, social, and political issues. What’s more, the

recent popularity of “zombiefests,” in which large numbers

of people dress as zombies and wander city streets, can be

seen ironically as acts of audience resistance to the

frightening socio-political themes that modern depictions of

zombies represent. These themes, heightened in the public’s

imagination since 9/11, include threats of infection and

contagion, breakdowns in societal structure and social

order, the balance between individual and group identity,

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and Western cultural attitudes and fears about death provide

a window into certain aspects of popular culture.

Zombies are one of the few monsters that originate from

a non-Gothic European tradition and that have passed

directly from folk culture into popular culture without

first being established in literature.2 Furthermore, some

Western researchers have claimed that zombies actually

exist, particularly in Haiti, and ethnobiologist Wade Davis

has documented at least two cases of people who claim to

have been zombies. He provides convincing ethnobiological

and physiological evidence that people can in fact be made

to seem as if they have arisen from the dead.3 Despite these

controversial claims, there is no doubt that many Haitians

believe zombies exist and fear them, although voudoun

(voodoo) practitioners, who can supposedly create zombies,

argue that black magic and creating zombies are done only by

evil voudou sorcerers, known as bokor. Voudou was in fact

recognized as an official religion by Haiti in April 2003,

with the government requiring voudou priests to register

with the government. Despite this official recognition, some

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voudoun say that it will take much more effort to erase the

stigma of the popular perceptions of them as practitioners

solely of black magic.4

Although there is still some debate over the origin of

the word zombie, most authorities believe the term is a

derivation of a word of West African origin, where many of

the slaves who ended up in Haiti were sent. The word likely

comes either from a tribe from Gabon called the Mitsogho,

who have the term ndzumbi – which means the cadaver of the

deceased – or from the Kongo nzambi, which means “spirit of

a dead person.” Davis chooses the latter interpretation, as

he argues in Passage of Darkness:

Death’s essence is the severance from the

mortal body of some elusive life-giving

principle, and how a culture comes to

understand or at least tolerate this

inexorable separation to a great extent

defines its mystical worldview. In Haiti, the

zombie sits on the cusp of death, and the

beliefs that mediate the phenomenon are

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rooted in the very heart of the peasant’s

being. The existence of zombies is but a

confirmation of a fundamental conviction that

the dead wield power in the world of the

living…

The permeability of the frontier between

life and death – indeed, between the material

and the immaterial – provides an important

backdrop for appreciating the magical beliefs

evident in all the popular tales of zombies.5

In Haitian folklore, there are two types of zombies:

spirit zombies (zombi jardin), and the type that has made its

way into popular culture, the body raised from the dead

(zombi corps cadavre). For Haitians, spirit zombies are much

more powerful and frightening than physical zombies, because

a bokor controls the spirit of a dead person and can inject

that spirit into a variety of living creatures to do the

bokor’s bidding. An easy way to classify the two types of

zombies is that spirit zombies are souls without bodies and

“walking” zombies are bodies without souls. It is the latter

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type of zombies that Davis explores through ethnography and

ethnobiology in Passage of Darkness, and, to some extent, in

his popularized 1985 account The Serpent and the Rainbow, which

was made into a movie of the same name, directed by Wes

Craven.6 And of course it is these latter types of zombies

that have made their way into the Western popular culture

imagination.

There is no clear date as to when zombies first

stumbled their way into the limelight of Western popular

culture, although William Seabrook’s fanciful 1929

travelogue of Haiti and descriptions of voudou, The Magic

Island, could certainly be considered a pivotal point in

spreading awareness of zombies.7 There is no doubt that the

U.S. military of occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and

news reports coming from the island related to the

occupation also stoked awareness of Haitian culture and

voudou that helped make Seabrook’s 1929 book popular, even

as many contemporary experts criticized the book for its

fantastic and inaccurate depictions. Subsequent books in the

early 1930s further sensationalized voudou. These included

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books by former marines who were stationed in Haiti, such as

Faustin Wirkus’ The White King of Gonave (for which Seabrook

wrote the introduction), and John Houston Craige’s Black

Baghdad and Cannibal Cousins.8 The titles generally make it

clear what type of audience the authors were aiming for.

Zombies entered the stage and screen in 1932, first

with Kenneth Webb’s stage production Zombie, and later that

summer with the first zombie film, White Zombie, by the

Halperin brothers. White Zombie was one of a spate of horror

films, many of which are now classics, that were made

following the success of Dracula. But unlike Frankenstein, The

Mummy, and The Invisible Man, White Zombie is mostly admired by

only a few avid horror film buffs and researchers of the

horror genre. White Zombie touched on themes that have shown

up in a number of zombie movies and sub-genre horror movies,

themes that the zombie as a monster type seems ideal to

explore. As Lowry and deCordova explain in their essay on

White Zombie,

…White Zombie offers a formative example of

the narrative/filmic figuration of desire in

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terms of possession. Not only is the paradigm

of possessor/possessed (which provides a

consistent structural bases for the subgenre

which White Zombie initiated) figured

narratively amongst the characters of the

film; it is also figured in the enunciative

devices employed to situate the viewer on

both sides of the paradigm at different

points.9

In other words, the theme of White Zombie helps explain

a larger issue of the film viewer as possessor of the image

even as he or she is possessed by the image he or she is

watching. Other researchers, such as Christian Metz and

Raymond Bellour, have also noted the similarities between

the dynamic of possessor/possessed and its function in

relation to subject and object in voyeurism and fetishism.10

Many of the ten or so zombie films made in the 1930s

and 1940s, such as Ouanga, Voodoo Man and Val Lewton’s

production I Walked With a Zombie dealt explicitly with either

possession of females for sexual reasons (in the first two

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films), and even touched on white/black racial issues in the

first and last films. Ouanga portrayed blacks and natives as

ignorant and evil, while Lewton is today widely praised for

his sensitive portrayal of natives and the issues

surrounding colonialism and race. It was relatively natural

to include these themes in the earliest zombie movies, with

their Caribbean settings and adherence to the folk culture

from which zombies came from, but there was also undoubtedly

a wellspring of issues on which to touch upon regarding the

socioeconomic milieu of rich, white plantation owners and

downtrodden black peasants and workers.

In the early years, zombies never reached the wild

popularity of the flashier types of monsters, such as

Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Wolfman. Part of

the reason was that zombies in this period were largely

portrayed as gaunt, slow-moving, and robotic. Zombies did

prove to be remarkably easy to transplant, and as early as

the 1940s zombie movies were starting to put zombies in non-

Caribbean settings. Examples include King of the Zombies and

Revenge of the Zombies, in which zombies are used to aid the

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Nazi cause. It is interesting to note that the theme of

Nazis utilizing zombies not only reappeared in the film

Shock Waves, but in a very popular early video game,

Wolfenstein 3-D, which was remade as Return to Castle Wolfenstein in

2001. This also shows how even in the earliest days of

zombies appearing in films there were interesting

connections being made between zombies and larger socio-

political issues relevant at the time.

Two factors removed the fear factor from the classic

movie monsters to movie goers in the latter 1940s and 1950s:

the spoofing cycle in which they appeared in comedies or

self-conscious parodies, and the atomic age that created a

completely new set of circumstances to be truly frightened

about. Compared to the real risk of nuclear annihilation (or

to some the equally frightening thought of Communist

domination), Frankenstein’s monster being chased by torch-

bearing villagers and Dracula’s Transylvanian accent amid

Gothic castles seemed almost quaint.

Zombies did not escape the irradiated and alien-

invading 1950s and early 1960s entirely unscathed, as it was

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a period in which horror films with the term “zombies” in

them were just as likely to mean the monsters were thinking,

planning Martians (Zombies of the Stratosphere) or deranged,

disfigured ex-lovers going on killing rampages (The Incredibly

Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?) as

they were traditional zombies. Dendle calls the 1950s and

1960s a “transitional time for the screen zombie,” which

shows that even after the traditional zombie largely

disappeared from the screen, there was still a strong

fascination with the word. Dendle in fact cites two science

fiction movies – Plan Nine From Outer Space and Invisible Invaders –

as closer in spirit to the zombie themes of revived dead and

possession than some of the movies that had the word

“zombie” in the titles. These two movies are good examples

of how some of the issues of depersonalization,

individuality, and privacy were portrayed during this

period.

What the zombie movies of the 1950s and early 1960s did

do, however, was further expand the limits of what zombies

could be and how they could appear, even to the point of

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portraying zombies as mutated, irradiated, humanoid fish, as

in The Horror at Party Beach. One unspoken taboo still remained –

showing zombies as rotting cadavers. Up to this point, the

human form remained largely inviolate in terms of showing

the decay that takes place after death, even as horror fans

watched fantastic creatures and humongous, deformed and

disfigured monsters rampage their ways across movie screens.

Although a Mexican director, Rafael Portillo, actually

first started showing rotting corpses in 1957 in his Aztec

Mummy series, it wasn’t until the 1966 Hammer release from

the UK of The Plague of the Zombies that most English-speaking

moviegoers saw decrepit, decomposing walking undead.11 Up to

this point in zombie movies, zombies were always portrayed

simply as gaunt, slow-moving automatons with shabby clothes,

as if a trip to the cleaners and a bit of rouge would be the

only things needed to freshen one up after a stint

underground.

Despite the horrific change of appearance of zombies in

The Plague of the Zombies, the movie’s zombies more or less

followed the traditional model of zombies in that they were

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controlled by a master, in this case a tin mine owner, who

used them as slave labor. The obvious connection to the

plight of Welsh coal miners was noted by critics at the

time.12 Their poor working conditions could easily be

compared to those faced by sugar plantation workers in

Haiti.

The seminal work that forever transformed how zombies

are portrayed is, of course, George Romero’s Night of the Living

Dead. Night started off not only a spate of zombie movies and

derivative zombie/cannibal movies for the next several

years, it ensured that zombies would in many ways replace

the classic monster types and science fiction creatures as

one of the most popular, widespread monsters in popular

culture, permeating not only movie culture in various

subgenres, but the popular lingo of the day in situations

ranging from insurance fraud to computer use and in recent

years making its way to DIY culture. It could be said that

Romero’s original presentation of zombies, although derived

from several older zombie traditions and portrayals,

including 1950s comic books, breathed new life into zombies.

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As Dendle states, “Romero liberated the zombie from the

shackles of a master, and invested his zombies not with a

function (a job or task such as zombies were standardly

given by voodoo priests), but rather a drive (eating

flesh).”13

In Night, Romero has said the story was derived from

Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, about the last man

alive after everyone else has been changed into vampires.

The Last Man On Earth and The Omega Man are both film versions

of I Am Legend, but Matheson said he was not happy with

either film and has said that although he has “no opinion”

about Night that it is “awfully close” to I Am Legend in tone

and spirit, rather than simply derived from it.14

Romero essentially conflated the zombie with the ghoul,

a cannibalistic monster type that never became very popular.

In fact, Romero originally called the zombies “ghouls,” but

the term “zombies” became the most accepted term for his

monsters in Night. Over the next several years, over sixty

movies would be made from all over the world that portrayed

zombies as cannibals, and the drive continues in modern

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computer video games, which copied the idea from movies.

Romero also popularized the notion that zombies could only

be truly killed by a blow or shot to the head or other such

head injury that severed the brain core, an idea he further

developed in Day of the Dead but that had been mentioned in a

couple of the older zombie movies of the 1940s.

In Night, it is not exactly clear how the dead people

were revived or turned into zombies, although shots of

newspaper articles mention a meteor passing through the

atmosphere or some other source of radiation, perhaps from

the government. Night has a claustrophobic, apocalyptic

sense, as the protagonists are trapped in a farmhouse

overnight and face an increasing onslaught of slow-moving

zombies driven to break into the house to eat the

inhabitants. Only one protagonist survives the night, and

that by hiding cowardly in the cellar, but when he emerges

into daylight he is shot by a truck full of rednecks who

mistakenly think he is a zombie. In this sense, order is

shown as restored as citizens seem to take back the

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countryside from the zombie infestation, even though it is

too late to help the movie’s protagonists.

The apocalyptic theme was taken up enthusiastically by

many of the zombie movies that followed Night when it

started gaining popularity in the midnight movie circuit

after its release. Many of the zombie movies of the 1970s

have a plot similar to Night; a small group of people are

trapped in a remote location and have to fight off numbers

of slow-moving zombies who want to eat them. Romero himself

amplifies the apocalyptic theme in the sequels to Night,

Dawn of the Dead, a social commentary on American mass

consumer society as zombies overtake survivors barricaded in

a shopping mall, and Day of the Dead, when the world is

apparently almost completely overrun by zombies and there

are only a few survivors left. This theme is reinforced by

the latest movie in the series, Land of the Dead, in which the

remaining humans barricade themselves within a walled city

that replicates the divisions of wealth (and safety) of pre-

zombie society.

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The theme of apocalypse from some ill-defined source or

through government shenanigans fits well with a culture that

had a generation of people growing up under the threat of

nuclear annihilation and that was coming of age and

questioning their government’s policies, as well as their

own identities, in the turbulent 1960s. In zombie movies and

video games of later years, reasons for the creation of

zombies range from radiation and government experiments to

corporate biological experiments gone awry, reflecting a

general popular distrust with big government and big

business.

The fact that zombies now had a physical and biological

drive, and that some aspect of their mentality still existed

(thus the need to destroy the brain core to really kill

them), nicely conflated the underlying themes that zombies

had long represented; the cherished idea of life after death

and the connection between our physical bodies and what we

consider our souls or spirits, which in secular Western

terms translates into “thought” or “mentality.” It is an

idea that Romero played on in Dawn, when one character

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explains to another that zombies are coming to the mall

because they return to places that were important to them

when they were alive – essentially saying that consumer

culture has become such a core element in the American

consciousness that a “drive to the mall” becomes more than a

simple descriptive term regarding a shopping trip.

It is also interesting to note how these movies played

on issues of individuality and social cohesiveness. Unlike

peasants in traditional Haitian society who fear being taken

from the community to become The One (a zombie), the

characters in the post-Night zombie movies – and, by

extension, the audience watching the films and identifying

with the characters – fear losing their individuality to

become one of The Many. Yet a tension exists within that

framework, as the protagonists must also work together to

try to overcome the zombie masses and survive. A desire to

fight off an uncontrollable transformation likely also plays

a role in the popularity of zombies in video games, in which

young teens see the approach of puberty and the end of

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carefree days as students and the coming of being a

corporate drone.

How could zombies cope with the changed horror

environment in the 1980s and 1990s, who were in some ways

victims of their own success, much like Dracula and

Frankenstein’s monster many years before them? Zombies had

already entered the modern age as victims of evil government

experiments or corporate greed and plans for world

domination, so where could they go from there? Even if Count

Dracula was looking more fruity than fearful in his black

cape and decrepit Gothic castle, the vampire legend itself

had plenty of room to adapt to the modern age, as Anne

Rice’s popular vampire novel series shows, as well as the

many new milieus in which vampires have appeared in recent

years. The workaday, blue-collar zombie, however, with his

rotting flesh, tattered clothes, redneck address and need

for human flesh, looked ready for a pink slip.

But zombies were saved from triviality in popular

culture and made frightening again, this time by video

games. In many ways, in fact, they were and are ideally

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suited to the video game environment. They are Everyman, or

more accurately, Everymonster, and thus can be put in a

number of scenarios, ranging from Nazi Germany (Wolfenstein 3-

D) to space stations (System Shock) to near-future scenarios

on earth (Resident Evil) to the old-fashioned haunted house

(House of the Undead 2). Because of the interactive nature of

video games, they engage players in the content of the game

much more than simply passively watching a movie on

television.15

It wasn’t the traditional Haitian zombie that made its

way into video games, however, but the “new zombie” that had

evolved from Romero’s Night. Video game creators borrowed

directly from the popular conceptions of zombies of the time

when including them in video games, which included their

drive for eating flesh (thus reconfirming the fear of what a

zombie would do to the player character, rather than of

necessarily being turned into a zombie like in the folklore

tradition), the ability to kill them only by blows or shots

to the head, the hazy, pseudo-scientific/evil government

origins of what made them zombies in the first place, and

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the fear of contagion they represented, which was explored

in some of the zombie movies from the late 1970s and that

resonated well in a world introduced to AIDS.

Zombies are the perfect monster for beginning players

in games, who have little patience in reading long

instruction manuals and who want to start playing quickly.

Zombies are slow-moving, allowing players to develop their

hand-eye coordination and playing skills of shooting or

hitting, they are relatively easy to kill, quickly giving

players a sense of empowerment within the game environment,

and yet they continue to frighten with their sudden

appearances around corners, their moans, and relentless but

plodding pursuit of the player character. With horror

movies, audiences have become jaded, but with video games,

they still have the potential to make one jump and be

frightened.

There are many social and psychological theories on why

horror and watching violence are popular, ranging from the

aesthetic theory of destruction in which viewers find a

certain beauty in watching something get destroyed, to the

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pleasure found in violating social norms without fear of

reprisals.16 Many of the theories lack empirical evidence to

conclusively show how accurate they might be, although they

do seem to intuitively touch on certain aspects of

conventional wisdom regarding psychology and enjoyment. Some

journalists comment on the enjoyment of playing violent

video games by children as a way for them to overcome their

real-world physical restrictions of small size and lack of

strength.17

Because zombies evolved in the popular cultural

imagination the way they did, they symbolize a guilt-free

monster to kill. If zombies were still perceived in their

folkloric conception, as people who were controlled by a

single person to do that person’s bidding, then ethical

questions could arise on the morality of killing beings who

were essentially victims of another’s evil plans. However,

since the modern conception of zombies has removed the evil

master and replaced him with simply a physical or biological

drive or craving to kill or eat humans it becomes

essentially a no-brainer – zombies are bad, and we are good.

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But an interesting thing happened on the way to the

Xbox. Players have increasingly chosen to play as zombies,

despite several disadvantages to winning, which became

possible in the Warcraft and Diablo series of games. In 2005,

Wideload Games released their inaugural game, Stubbs the

Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse, to generally positive gaming

reviews.18 As the title suggests, the player takes the role

of a zombie and kills humans, turning them into zombies to

then kill others and create more zombies. The player can lob

their internal organs at humans and even detach their head

and use it as a bowling ball to disable opponents. Made with

a healthy sense of parody, it nevertheless highlights how

zombies have made yet one more transformation – into the

lives of gamers willing to play as a zombie.

The willingness to be “zombiefied” does not stop at the

Xbox console, however. Periodically in the past several

years, there have been events held in cities such as New

York and San Francisco in which gatherings of people dressed

as zombies walk the streets. Websites offer helpful tips on

creating realistic-looking wounds and blood effects, and

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pictures of the event are posted on sites like Flickr. In

the UK, a group called Terror4Fun has hosted ZombieFests for

the past few years, which include zombie movie nights,

workshops on creating good special effects, and Live Action

Role-Playing (LARP), in which dozens of participants play

various roles over the course of a day (overseen by referees

of sorts who direct the storyline) and that end up with a

sole “survivor.”19

In Minneapolis on September 9, 2006 a Zombie Pub Crawl

was held that attracted 350 participants dressed as zombies

in various states of blood and gore, shuffling from one bar

to another. The pub crawl website sums up the spirit of the

event: “Why the zombie pub crawl? Because it's pretty much

the greatest idea for a pub crawl ever conceived. Walking

down the street in a horde of zombies and drinking?  It’s a

dream come true.”20 The Minneapolis police did not share the

fun spirit at a “zombie dance party” held in July 2006 in

Minneapolis, arresting six people dressed as zombies for

carrying devices that looked like WMDs – which turned out to

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be backpacks with homemade stereos in them so the zombies

could dance.21

The evolution of zombies from the folkloric tradition

into their current form in Western popular horror

entertainment, and the burgeoning DIY entertainment culture,

makes it unlikely they will fade into obscurity in the

popular imagination. Zombies, or at least the concept of

zombies, have also permeated other aspects of our daily

lives, ranging from “zombie insurance” in which people claim

insurance policies for people who have not yet died, home

PCs being turned into zombies by a hacker who then controls

the computer to do his or her own bidding, and zombie

companies in countries like Japan in which they seem like

regular companies in all respects but actually are heavily

supported by infusions of cash from banks. Zombies have also

showed up in online communication environments such as MUDs

(multi-user dimensions), in which users create avatars of

themselves and communicate with others in real-time chats.

Some technologically savvy and malicious users in these MUDs

can take control of someone else’s avatar and have them do

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obnoxious or perverse acts. People who have been victims of

this type of zombiefication report feeling personally

violated, even sometimes using the term “raped” as they

watch helplessly as their characters sexually assault or

curse at other characters in the chat rooms. This is an

interesting twist in how a new technology reverts back to

the traditional concept of a zombie as someone taken over by

a single master.

But in terms of popular culture and entertainment,

zombies are versatile enough to be the fall guys for a range

of paranoid theories on secret government programs or evil

corporate plans. Likewise, in the dress up and re-enactments

that people are doing in various locales and at times other

than Halloween, zombies represent an abandonment of society

even as they envelop the individual in a security blanket of

community, a community in which not much is asked and where

the rules of behavior are clear. There is something

terrifying about being turned into a zombie, but something

strangely comforting in choosing to be one, almost like

Cholo (John Leguizamo) in Land of the Dead after he is bitten

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by a zombie when he tells his friend to not kill him just

yet because he was “always curious about what it would be

like” – as if it is a lifestyle choice. In that, perhaps the

special power zombies hold over our imaginations they not

only show us that we can fight powerful societal forces on

our own, but that even when dealing with mysterious forces

greater than ourselves there will be a comforting sense of

community, even in (un)death.

* This paper is largely derived from Chapter 1, “The Evolution of the Zombie: The

Monster That Keeps Coming Back,” in the book Zombie Culture: Autopsies

of the Living Dead, co-edited by Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette

(Scarecrow Press, 2008). Substantial sections have been edited or deleted and

other sections inserted to better address the more specific topic of the

presentation given at the Rider Horror Symposium.

Notes

1. Kyle Bishop, “Dead Man Still Walking: Explaining the

Zombie Renaissance,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, Spring

2009, vol. 37 no. 1.

27

2. Peter Dendle, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia (Jefferson,

NC and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2001).

3. Wade Davis, Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian

Zombie (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

1988).

4. Michael Norton, “Haiti Officially Sanctions Voodoo,”

April 10, 2003,

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_769262.html (19 June

2003).

5. Davis, Passage, 57-58.

6. Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (London: Time

Warner, 1987).

7. W.B. Seabrook, The Magic Island (New York: Harcourt

Brace, 1929).

8. Faustin Wirkus and Taney Dudley, The White King of Gonave

(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1931); John Houston Craige,

Black Baghdad (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1933); and

John Houston Craige, Cannibal Cousins (New York: Minton, Balch

& Company, 1934).

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9. Edward Lowry and Richard deCordova, “Enunciation and

the Production of Horror in White Zombie,” in Planks of Reason:

Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Metuchen, NJ:

The Scarecrow Press, 1984), 346-389.

10. Ibid., 350, emphasis original.

11. See Dendle.

12. Gary A. Smith, Uneasy Dreams: The Golden Age of British

Horror Films, 1956-1976 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company,

2000).

13. Dendle.

14. Paul M. Riordan, “He is Legend: Richard Matheson,”

Sci-Fi Station – Sci-Fi Masters Series,

http://www.scifistation.com/matheson/matheson_index.html (21

July 2006).

15. Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: Videogames and the

Entertainment Revolution (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000).

16. Dolf Zillman and Peter Vorderer, Media Entertainment:

The Psychology of its Appeal (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates, 2000).

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17. G. Jones, “Playing It Out,” Game Developer, January

1, 2003, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/printdoc (15

April 2003).

18. Chris Kohler, “Mmmmmmmm, Brains,” Wired Online,

October 28, 2005,

http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,69349,00.html (1 Nov.

2005).

19. Terror4Fun.com, Terror4Fun Homepage,

http://terror4fun.com/zombie_homepage.html (10 Sep. 2006).

20. Zombie Pub Crawl Website,

http://www.zombiepubcrawl.com/index.php (12 Sep. 2006).

21. Associated Press, “‘Zombies’ Booked for Carrying

Fake WMDs,” July 25, 2006,

http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/state/minnesot

a/15117272.htm. (2 Sep. 2006).

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