Halloween is coming and that means zombies, the strange creations of both Haitian and American culture, are coming, too.
In today's popular culture, zombies are clumsy reanimated corpses that crave human brains, but the idea didn't start exactly that way.
The idea of a reanimated human comes from Haiti where such creatures were thought to be under the control of a sorcerer (bokor). Voodoo practitioners thought a bokor could combine herbs, poisons and ritual to resurrect the dead and enslave them. In fact, the Haitian zombie has often been portrayed as a metaphor for slavery, since the resurrected one had no free will and was forced into servitude. The very idea was terrifying.
The Haitian zombie probably traveled from its ghostly origins in Africa, finally landing in America through accounts of voodoo zombies in a 1929 book about Haitian voodoo cults.
But, the zombie's current incarnation is largely the creation of a 1968 film, George A Romero's Night of the Living Dead, partly inspired by a 1954 novel.
Since the 1990s, however, the zombie character has changed. In film and television, they have often been portrayed as runners, instead of the lumbering dead. They also enjoyed some depictions in romantic settings and, in video games, even as dogs. In music, Michael Jackson's Thriller made them cool, but their profile has declined in the 2000s.
