My mind started questioning "why zombies have been so popular in the last few years?" I remember my first encounter with the living dead when I watched George Romero's movie "Dawn of the Dead"followed by "Day of the Dead". I have been fascinated by the undead stories ever since. My current favorite zombie show is AMC's TV show " The Walking Dead". It does bring chill to my spine. I even planned to do a zombie walk, but I was late for the registration.I think it can be a proof that I am one of those zombie fanatics.
Unlike Vampire and Were Wolf who are pictured as good looking yet mysterious creatures, zombies are pictured as resurrected corpses who eat human flesh and have terrible looks. I admit that they are so disgusting. I might runaway when I meet one of them.Do you know that zombies were real? I couldn't believe it at first, but every story has its origin. When you look at Oxford dictionary, zombie can be defined as,
a corpse said to be revived by witchcraft, especially in certain African and Caribbean religions.Informal a person who is or appears lifeless, apathetic, or completely unresponsive to their surroundings.According to the definition Zombie, it is interesting because the term was initially, an element of the Haitian African-American religion known as Voodoo . In this context, the term zombie is used to describe a deceased individual who is revived and has their every action governed by a sorcerer or bokor. The revived subject is thought to have no will of its own and is said to remain in a ‘zombie-like’ state.This purposefully leaves a passive easily-controlled animated body – the zombie – believed to be created to provide free labour on plantations. It is believed that the bokor captures and stores the victims soul (or zombi astral) in a jar or bottle, which can be either be used to strengthen their powers or sold on to clients as a good luck charm.
Anthropologist Wade David claimed to have identified the ingredients of the bòkò’s zombification powder which supposedly included tetrodotoxin – a naturally occurring neurotoxin found in some animals, like the pufferfish, which can cause temporary coma-like states.
Actually, Zombies are rich with symbolism and metaphors. Not merely, a theme of a movie or TV show.Zombies of the Haitian
Voodoo variety represent a loss of cognition/ consciousness and also a loss
of free will. What is it except these things, after all, that separates us from
animals. By "controlling" another person and eliminating that persons
ability to make choices, let alone engage in conscious thought, the "controller"
has reduced that person to the level of an animal and has robbed him of his
humanity. A distinct parallel might be drawn here between cultures that have
promoted the use of slavery (such as our own) and zombie films. To fear the
possibility of zombies, then, is to fear enslavement.
In modern days, Zombies embody the human fear, not only one single kind of fear but it takes it forms in different kinds of fears that we face in our everyday lives.They come to embody
the human fear of our own dead tissue. We, as humans, go to great lengths to
obscure the remains of our dead, especially our loved ones. If someone we know
dies, our mental image of that person stops at the grave.When we build a picture
in our mind's eye of that person, it is not the rotting corpse or skeletal remains
that we see-even though that is the person's current status--but the memory
of that persons conscious life. It is no mistake that we bury our corpses "six
feet under" so as to eradicate the ugliness of decomposition.
Therefore, to confront a zombie is to be reminded of
our own mortality. It, as is proven in Night of the Living Dead and its
ilk, is especially terrifying to encounter, let alone be attacked by, the physical
image of one's deceased beloved. Being that our mortality is something that
we try to decorate with tidy rituals and outright denial, zombies serve as a
painfully striking reminder that we will all eventually return to the same stinking
earthly essence from which we are born.
Night of the Living
Dead and its counterparts also illustrate the fear of widespread apocalyptic
destruction. It is not a coincidence that these movies appeared mostly at the
height of the Cold War paranoia that was taking place earlier this century.
Much like the atomic bomb, zombies are unleashed in a chain reaction, each devoured
corpse arising and looking for more human flesh to consume. As the zombie count
increases exponentially, they cover more and more distance until they overtake
massive amounts of land area. Indeed, by the end of Romero's Day of the Dead
(1985), the final installment of his "Dead" trilogy, only a small
militia-esque band of survivors is remaining in the United States. Consequently,
they choose to relocate to an uninhabited island in the tropics as the U.S.
becomes a barron wasteland, populated only by the walking dead. At the conclusion
of Return of the Living Dead (1985), the U.S. government chooses simply
to erase the area populated by zombies with a nuclear missle (ironically, the
process of human reanimation was enacted by nuclear radiation to begin with
and thus, in this reciprocity of events, not only is the fear of holocaust represented,
but also the metaphorical enactment of full-on nuclear war).
Zombies also represent widespread annihalation in the
form of plague-like sickness. The implications here are basically the same as
they are with nuclear apocalypse, but on a more personal and intimate level.
Romeroesque zombies multiply by infecting their victims through the mixing of
bodily fluids (saliva, etc.). When a person is attacked by a zombie, that person,
in a process similar to that enacted by vampires, becomes a member of the "undead."
As is the case with the cold war similarities, the fact that the majority of
the Night..-style zombie movies arrived during the 80s during the height
of the AIDS epidemic is difficult to overlook.
After all, Zombie is not only a fictional story but it also brings our understandings to our fears, that probably is a good preparation to us to encounter unexpected events in the future....
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