Zombies, Mythology, and the Origins of the Zombie Genre
The following is an excerpt from Dissecting The Walking Dead: Slicing Into The Guts of Television’s Hottest Show, available in paperback and for Kindle. Shambling corpses with ragged clothing still clinging to their grey, rotting bodies. An unsteady, drunken walk. Long, pitiful moans and an aching hunger for human flesh. The image is by now so familiar even people with no interest in the genre know it inside and out. These are zombies. But zombies weren’t always depicted this way. Once upon a time, the zombie was something much different, a creature linked with black magic and Voodoo and having nothing to do with eating flesh. It seems as if they’ve been around forever, but our modern view of zombies is actually a relatively new creation. The first recorded use of the term “zombie”…
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