Zombie Movies – A Brief History Of The Undead

[This is an article from Little White Lies magazine. It discusses the first ever zombie films and how George Romero altered the genre with 'Night of the Living Dead' in 1968]

In 1791, Haiti, island of voodoo, was engulfed by violence. Rebellious slaves exacted a terrible vengeance on their white masters. Power now rested with the bokos, legendary practitioners of dark sorcery who, it was said, could reanimate the corpses of their enemies. Haiti became known as ‘the land of the living dead’ – the home of the zombie.

The Haitian rebellion coincided with the rise of Gothic horror, influencing the likes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In turn, these novels – augmented by the work of author HP Lovecraft – captured the imagination of Hollywood as its new fangled cinema came of age in the 1920s.

The zombie made its first on-screen appearance in 1932, in Victor Halperin’s White Zombie. It starred Béla Lugosi as an evil voodoo master who turns the beautiful Madge Bellamy into a zombie and instructs her to murder her fiancée. Inspired as much by Tod Browning’s 1931 film, Dracula, as Haitian folklore (it was filmed on some of the same sets), it nevertheless showed zombies as semi-sentient workers, keeping with the stories that had emerged from the island.

It prefigured a wave of similar films, including a sequel, Revolt of the Zombies in 1936, as well as King of the Zombies (1941) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943). Most notable for being set in the Caribbean, these films belied a tradition of subtle racism in which the terrifying ‘other’ is an outsider, dramatising the fear of foreigners at a time of global unrest.

That tradition was irrevocably altered in 1968, when an unknown first-time director from Pittsburgh put together an independent horror movie with a tiny budget and no stars. George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead went on to re-write the rules of the genre.

The plot was simple: a disparate group of strangers are holed up in an isolated farmhouse under siege by the undead. But in setting his apocalyptic vision in Middle America, Romero dramatically brought devastation to the home front at a time when America was in crisis over the Vietnam War.

For the first time, zombies now looked like your friends and family – even children were no longer to be trusted. Romero had dramatised the inter-generational crisis that was exploding on the streets of America as educated university kids clashed with blue-collar cops. By casting a black actor, Duane Jones, as his hero, Romero confronted head on the Civil Rights movement, and prefigured the tragedies that would beset it in his shocking final scene.

The enduring legacy of Night of the Living Dead was to turn the zombie into an allegory for, well, almost anything. That blank-eyed gaze and insatiable hunger were the perfect vehicle for metaphor, one that Romero would richly exploit in two sequels, Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985), as well as a number of more recent reprisals.