Coffee for Zombies |
Zombies, unlike vampires, werewolves, and a bevy of other monster types, really have few literary antecedants. There are some popular journalistic, folkloric and anthropologic accounts of zombies, usually of the type associated with the practice of "voodoo" in the Carribean. These type of zombie tales are some of the earliest to make their way into the cinema, such as the 1932 film, White Zombie. In this conceptualization of the Zombie, the zombie is either a reanimated corpse or a living human being brought under the power of a powerful Voudun shaman or sorceror, usually by the use of psychoactive chemicals or secret magic.
By the late 1960s the zombie in its contemporary shape makes its appearance in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). Various incarnations since envision the willless zombie as not under the control of an individual, but rather part of a mass event where the dead are reanimated and seek to feast on the living.
How do the rules for zombies expressed in the work you read for this week embody the rules for zombies generally? Just what is the metaphor being presented by the figure of the zombie? Moreover, what can we make of the zombie as it has become a fixture in contemporary popular culture; why have zombies become so popular?