Through the years, the zombie concept has undergone many makeovers and shifts in meaning on film and in literature. Culturally, the word began as a Voodoo practice, in which a priest would supposedly steal the soul from another person, essentially "killing" him or her, and transforming that person into a mindless slave. The details of this practice are a topic for another time and place, but the
idea of the zombie has remained much the same, changing only in details.
The basic idea of the zombie in film and literature, whether technically dead or still alive and breathing, seems to require only that the zombie in question is a mindless, essentially soulless, slave. In Voodoo, it was a slave to a physical master. In most of today's art, it is a slave merely to its baser instincts. They key, however, is that the zombie has lost the essential functions of self-identity, self-awareness, and self-control.
In this sense, perhaps
Wikipedia is correct in listing the first zombie film as 1920's
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Caligari features a Somnambulist under the control of an evil magician or hypnotist, and therefore fits the basic requirements of loss of self and conversion to slave.
However, when most zombie purists are asked, these requirements simply aren't enough. No, a true zombie, they say, is the reanimated dead. He is a flesh eater, controlled only by his need to feed. Because he is dead, he can only be stopped by destroying that part of the brain which keeps the rest of the body moving. Or, perhaps I should say, keeps the rest of the body shambling. This is, for many, zombie canon. And that canon was written by George A. Romero.
In
Night of the Living Dead, Romero reinvented the zombie, and the zombie narrative, creating an apocalyptic vision that has been imitated by and served as an inspiration for an entire sub-genre of horror, not only in film, but in literature as well. Both survival horror (in the realm of video games) and siege horror (particularly in film) have
NotLD to thank for much of their content.
George Romero, of course, wasn't trying to create a new genre. In fact, when he and his fellow filmmakers decided to shoot a movie, they went with horror for no other reason than budget limitations: they knew horror would be easiest to film with little to no money. Somewhere in the process, Romero came up with the idea that people would rise from their graves and eat the living. "Ghouls," he called them.
Somewhere down the line, somebody (not Romero) noted the similarities between George's Ghouls and the undead of Haitian lore, and the modern Zombie was born.
The Romero zombie is known best for what it lacks: memories, empathy, reason... that spark of life that makes humans human. It cannot talk or perform any but the most basic functions of life. It is defined as much by its shambling gait as it is by its insatiable hunger. It has enough latent memory to use simple tools, and to learn in the most simplistic of fashions.
Many of these traits have carried over into books and films ever since, defining a new monster and a new genre. But more than that, Romero and company took the siege horror first made popular by Richard Matheson in
I Am Legend, and popularized it. Now the siege is nearly more an integral part of zombie canon than the creatures themselves.
So, with the Romero canon as a starting point, what, exactly, is a zombie? Undead or merely infected? Slow-moving or fast? Flesh-eating, brain-sucking, or simply murderous? Only one thing is sure: when they attack your house/mall/bunker/mansion/island... aim for the brain.
