Zombies, thousands of them. At the movies, on TV, in computer games, on Facebook, roaming the streets in protest or for kicks, the undead hordes have never been more prevalent. They’re a relatively new phenomenon, as monsters in Western horror go, lacking the canonical pedigree of werewolves or vampires. But the plague spreads quickly. The zombie as it emerged in 20th-century American popular culture, though nominally a figure looted from Haitian folklore, is a recombination of familiar mythological tropes: reanimated corpses, anthropophagy, brainwashing, speechlessness, herd instinct. The first zombie movie is generally reckoned to be Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), in which Bela Lugosi plays a mill owner in Haiti who uses voodoo to control his black zombie workers, and to enslave a young white American woman who’s engaged to one of his neighbours. As Kyle William Bishop writes in American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, ‘this germinal film presented audiences with the exoticism of the Caribbean, a fear of domination and subversion, and the perpetuation of the imperialist model of cultural and racial hegemony.’[*]

LRB 26 January 2012 | PDF Download