Nowadays, zombies are generally the product of some sort of scientific process, such as a viral infection spread by biting. But when I was a kid (late 70’s - early 80’s) zombies were usually created through the use of black magic, raised from the dead by a voodoo shaman. I’m not really into the zombie genre, so I was curious. When did this shift from magic to a scientific origin take place? Was there a single influential work that started it, or was it a more gradual change? Is there any particular reason for the shift?
George Romero and John Russo pretty much created the modern idea of zombies with Night of the Living Dead in 1968.
I’m not sure I agree with your premise, some times the zombies are science based but more often than not the cause is unknown. The most popular zombie show “The Walking Dead” has never given a source for the zombies. Neither did the most popular zombie book “World War Z” or the movie that was vaguely based on it. None of the Romero movies ever give a concrete reason. Of the top of my head the only popular zombie franchises that give a scientific reason for the outbreak are the “return of the living dead” movies from the 80s and “28 days later” which are barely zombies.
The walking dead had a scene of a brain scan showing the brain “re-awakening”. I’d call that a “science based” phenomena. It doesn’t explain the origin but does show some process other than magic occurring.
The original Night of the Living Dead did have a radio report that speculated that the zombies were caused by a probe returning from Venus that exploded in the atmosphere. I don’t think that was intended to be the actual answer, and the same report says scientists and the military still have no idea what caused it, but it does sort of “bait the hook” for there being a scientific explanation behind this genre of zombie film. Later films in the series, where we see scientists experimenting on the dead, probably helped cement it as a “science” thing.
I disagree. I think most zombie franchises purposely keep the reason unknowable because if they go science based it tends to push the story into a search for the cure instead of zombies as a catalyst for the real conflict.
Night of the Living Dead has a scientist positing space radiation from a crashed satellite. Which isn’t “concrete” but certainly sets a different tone than “…or maybe voodoo magic”.
The idea of a scientifically-animated creature has been around since Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Matheson are often credited with popularizing the notion.
It’s a guess, no more certain than “when there is no more room in hell the dead will walk the earth”.
The book(s) most definitely did- they mention some sort of virus called “Solanum” that causes the dead to rise, etc…
George Romero claimed in various interviews that he was inspired by Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend to make his zombies. so if you’re claiming Romero as your source, Romero’s source was a 1954 novel, which was actually trying to give a science-fiction gloss to Vampires, not Zombies.
Matheson’s book was first adapted to film in 1964 as The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price in an unusual-for-him role. Matheson wrote the first draft of the screenplay, but wasn’t happy with the way the film ultimately veered from his work, and used a pseudonym. Nevertheless, the film predates Night of the Living Dead by four years.
Despite Romero’s claim, however, I think he was much more heavily influenced by a movie, rather than a book. Invisible Invaders, a 1959 film, featured invaders from space who took over dead human bodies and attacked the living. They didn’t eat people, but they had the same dark-circles-under-the-eyes look as Romero’s zombies, the same stiff walk, and they went about dressed in suits (as they were buried in, or as they wore when they died), and the whole look is similar to Romero’s zombies. Plus, the “zombies” WERE in this case revived by a “satellite in outer space”
Of course, you could make many of the same arguments about Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from Outer Space 9which was originally to be called “Grave Robbers from Outer Space”), which also came out in 1959, but Invisible Invaders had infinitely higher production values, not to mention the presence of John Carradine (who, like Lugosi, had also played Dracula, another famous revenant) and other stars of note. So I think "scientific’ zombies date back at least to 1959.
As I said, it’s not concrete but offers a scientific explanation for it instead of “A wizard did it”. It also came during an era of numerous horror and monster films which used (generally laughable) science as their foundation. I think you’re dismissing it (and its impact on later films) a little too readily.
Scientific creation of zombies goes back at least to the 1940s. King of the Zombies (1941) uses a combination of voodoo and Nazi science, while in Revenge of the Zombies (1943), it’s all Nazi science. In Invisible Invaders (1959), aliens possess the bodies of the recently deceased.
ETA: Ninja’d on the last by Mr. Meacham.
There’s never been any suggestion in The Walking Dead that there are supernatural causes for zombies. And while much of the show is focused on conflicts between humans, there have been several story lines related to zombification being some kind of infection and finding a cure for it. The Walking Dead clearly suggests that there is some kind of scientific basis for zombies. (Set aside the fact that zombies appear to defy physical laws like being able to walk around for years without any energy input like food.)
The original I Walked with a Zombie, which was instrumental in popularizing the term, was ambiguous, but definitely leaned toward a scientific explanation: people were turned into zombies due to a combination of drugs and psychological manipulation.
The one scientist on the show suggested a scientific basis, but his only real answer was “we don’t know and we can’t cure it”. The Walking Dead takes place on the “real” world where things like magic and voodoo don’t exist so the default assumption is disease either man made or natural, but we don’t actually KNOW. Same is true for Romero zombies. There are only a couple examples with clearly defined scientific explanations for zombies, the government chemical barrels in Return of the Living Dead and the Rage virus from the monkey experiments in 28 Days Later. Everything else is guesses and theories, obviously mostly science based because the worlds they take place on are mostly realistic ones.
“Solanum” is actually the genus that includes potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplants, among other foodstuffs, so be very careful in your vegetable garden…
It’s worth mentioning, I think, that Night of the Living Dead never actually uses the word “zombie” to describe its undead antagonists. Romero tended to call them “ghouls,” and the characters in the movie mostly call them “those things.” I’m not sure when the “hoards of undead feasting on the living” came to be called “zombies”–possibly it had to do with the Italian zombie films of people like Lucio Fulci–but Romero wasn’t responsible for that part of it.
I’ve always kind of wished that popular culture had settled on a different name for these things. The sort of ravening undead things craving human flesh that are modern “zombies” are really a very different type of monster than the magically-created undead slave labor that derives from Haitian folklore.
The Return Of The Living Dead movies(five so far) use a chemical called “Trioxin” to create the zombies.
Sounds like the question I should be asking is, how did the Haitian zombie become conflated with the sci-fi zombie in the 70’s? I suppose there was a general interest in magic and the supernatural at the time. I remember when I was a kid that I was certain that I’d either disappear in the Bermuda Triangle, or be possessed by the Devil.
It’s more likely that a cleric did it, since animate dead is a lower-level spell for them. 