We’re all fascinated by zombies. The flesh-eating creatures philosophically taunt us with their alternate name, “the living dead,” as their concept tantalizes us by combining our fear of dying and our desire for immortality. They can be scary, funny and even romantic while they serve as various metaphors for social commentary.
Because of their uniform lack of identity, they’re often monsters as MacGuffins, blank pages upon which both artists and audiences project their own ideas. Zombies have made their way out of legend and literature into all corners of entertainment, from music to movies and television to video games.
Their origins are ancient and they seem like they’ll live on forever (we hope). Here are 10 ways zombies infiltrated pop culture:
Bela Lugosi’s Undead
The first written reference to the concept of zombies may have been 4,000 years ago with The Epic of Gilgamesh, but the idea entered the modern mainstream in 1929 with the novel The Magic Island by W.B. Seabrook.
That text then inspired the 1932 movie White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi as an evil master of voodoo, who can turn victims into zombies with a potion. But this kind of zombie is curable, not really an undead being in a postmortem state.
(As a side note, you may remember the band White Zombie, headed by Rob Zombie, who calls Bela Lugosi and horror films an influence on his music and movies: House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects and Halloween.)
A Legendary Influence
To call zombies the undead is to align them with Bram Stoker’s Dracula and vampires in general. But Richard Matheson’s 1958 novel I Am Legend is pretty much about a zombie apocalypse yet refers to its monsters specifically as vampires. It has influenced almost every other piece of zombie fiction since.
The story makes zombies out to be victims of a curable disease. Its focus is on a sole-surviving man immune to this disease, played in direct adaptations of varying faithfulness by Vincent Price, Charlton Heston and Will Smith.
The Rocking Dead
Even before any movies were made of I Am Legend, a British rock group continued to popularize the term through their name, the Zombies. The band, best known for “Time of the Season,” didn’t dress like ghouls and their music wasn’t macabre in any way. They apparently just chose the name to be unique.
Given their cameo (seen in the trailer below), we could almost consider Otto Preminger’s classic Bunny Lake Is Missing to be a “zombie movie.”
The Godfather of the Dead
In 1968, George Romero changed everything with his low-budget indie Night of the Living Dead, which was heavily influenced by I Am Legend, among other things, and launched the genre despite never using the word “zombie.”
In addition to further influencing all other zombie movies, Romero also made multiple sequels to his debut, including the more blatantly satirical entries Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead.
Thriller Night
The Zombies may have kept the word in music fans’ minds through their name, but 20 years later Michael Jackson brought the undead further into the pop music zeitgeist with his song “Thriller” and the album of the same name.
It was the 1983 music video for the tune, directed by John Landis, which made the biggest mark. Jackson and a bunch of backup performers dressed as zombies introduced a dance of the dead that remains one of the most iconic of all time. It is the only video that has ever been selected for the National Film Registry, which called it the most famous video of all time.
Thrilling Knight
The most famous zombie video game might be Resident Evil, but more than a decade before its release, there was the arcade staple Ghosts ‘n Goblins, which introduced the creatures to the interactive play of a side-scrolling platform game.
Finally we got to kill the zombies ourselves, by way of a knight traveling through a graveyard filled with all sorts of monsters on his way to save a princess. Surprisingly, unlike Resident Evil, this game was never turned into a movie series.
Walks of the Dead
For the last 15 years, since the first such event at Milwaukee’s Gen Con, gatherings and parades known as Zombie Walks have been held all over the world, with records for participation reaching upwards of 30,000 people, all dressed as undead.
In addition to walks, many of these Zombie Walk events also many involve dances, pub crawls, movie screenings, charitable food drives and car washes where the zombies bloody your car before scrubbing it clean. If being terrified while walking isn’t enough to get your heart pumping, try any number of the zombie runs that take place around the country.
Capes and Cannibals
As zombies lurched into just about every entertainment medium last decade, sure enough they made their way into comic books, too. Marvel Zombies was one of the most popular storylines from any superhero franchise in years.
Many fans hope Marvel will one day put the zombie versions of its characters on the big screen, and when that happens we’ll know there’s nothing that can’t be done with these creatures.
Fight the Dead, Fear the Living
Zombies have shown up here and there over the years on the small screen, most recently in the clever, witty hit procedural iZombie, but in the many decades of television there has never been anything like AMC’s The Walking Dead, which debuted in 2010.
With its record-setting ratings, that show sparked interest in the possibility of a real zombie pandemic (the CDC is even “prepared” for the scenario), spawned the spin-off Fear the Walking Dead and inspired the CW’s iZombie and Syfy’s action-drama Z Nation.
An Actual Invasion
Zombies are so big now that they’re infiltrating already classic works. With the 2009 publication of Seth Grahame-Smith’s mash-up novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, these creatures proved they could invade other pieces of pop culture, too.
Where they’ll wind up next is unknown, but for now we can look forward to the movie version of Grahame-Smith’s horror-infused parody of the Jane Austen classic, coming next February.
What's your favorite zombie movie or show? Tell us below!
