Today we will try to know history of zombies and how zombies came into literary world and world of movies.
In 1819, the English word ‘zombie’ was first recorded as ‘zombi’, by poet Robert Southey. According to Oxford Dictionary, the word is originated from West Africa.
The Magic Island was published in the year 1929 by W. B. Seabrook is one of the first books that introduced the voodoo concept to Western culture.
The elucidation of zombies is drawn hugely from the film Night of the Living Dead by George A. Romero, which was partially inspired by a novel named I Am Legend written by Richard Matheson.
According to Linda Troost’s, The Undead Eighteenth Century ‘zombies’ occurred in literature around 1697 and were defined with terms such as ghosts and spirits.
They appeared during the same time as Dracula and Frankenstein, with the release of White Zombie in the year 1932.
1980 onwards there were dozens of films based on zombies, including the popular Scooby-Doo, even he fought with zombies in Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, released in the year 1998.
Then the 2013 release of the Brad Pitt movie World War Z, made the zombie apocalypse popular and took it to a different level.