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
1
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,
2
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
3
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
4
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
8
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
9
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
12
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.
13
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.
16
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
17
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
19
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
21
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.
22
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
23
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
24
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
25
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
26
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).
28
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).
29
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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