The English word ‘zombie’ was first recorded in 1819, in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey. The word zombie is not used in Night of the Living Dead, but was applied later by fans. In East Asia during the late 1990s, the Japanese zombie video games Resident Evil and The House of the Dead led to a resurgence of zombies in popular culture. The late 2000s and 2010s saw the humanization and romanticization of the zombie archetype.
About Zombies in brief
A zombie is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. The English word ‘zombie’ was first recorded in 1819, in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey. The word zombie is not used in Night of the Living Dead, but was applied later by fans. In East Asia during the late 1990s, the Japanese zombie video games Resident Evil and The House of the Dead led to a resurgence of zombies in popular culture. The late 2000s and 2010s saw the humanization and romanticization of the zombie archetype, with the zombies increasingly portrayed as friends and love interests for humans. In this context, zombies are often seen as stand-ins for discriminated groups struggling for equality, and the human–zombie romantic relationship is interpreted as a metaphor for sexual liberation and taboo breaking. How the contemporary zombie came to be called ‘zombies’ is not fully clear. According to George Romero, he used the term ‘ghoul’ in his original script for his sequel Dawn of the Dawn, including in dialog including once in the dialog of the sequel to the first film. In Haitian folklore, a zombie is an animated corpse raised by witchcraft. The concept has been associated with the religion of voodoo, but it plays no part in that faith’s formal practices. The term is popularly used in animated movies such as Corpse Bride, Pushing Daisies and iZombie, and manganovelanime series Sankarea: Undying Love and Is This a Zombie? Notable examples of the latter include movies Warm Bodies and Zombies, novels American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Generation Dead by Daniel Waters, and Bone Song by John Meaney, animated movie Corpse Bride and Corpse Bride: The Corpse Bride.
In the U.S. the term zombie is most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works, such as The Walking Dead and The Walking corpses. In South Africa, the word is used to refer to a zombie-like character in the film The Walking Corpse. In Australia, the term is used for a zombie in the TV series The Walking corpse. In New Zealand, the phrase zombie is used as a derogatory term for a person who has been infected with a zombie virus. It is also used in Australia and the United States to describe a zombie who has become infected by a virus that has spread to other parts of the body. In Japan, the popular term is “zombie” or “zombi” for a dead body that has been reanimated through various methods, most commonly magic. In Brazil, the English word “zombies” is used in the form of “zumbi” (or ” zombi”), which means “to wander the earth to torment the living” and is related to the Kongo words nzambi and “zum” (meaning “soul”). The word was used by George A. Romero to describe the antagonists in his film Night of The Living Dead.
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This page is based on the article Zombies published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 09, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
