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"Zombie" is a protest song by Irish alternative rock band the Cranberries. It was written by the lead singer, Dolores O'Riordan, about the young victims of a bombing in Warrington, England, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
- Alternative Rock Grunge
A zombie (Haitian French: zombi, Haitian Creole: zonbi, Kikongo: zumbi) is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. In modern popular culture, zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works.
Zombie Lyrics. [Verse 1] Another head hangs lowly. Child is slowly taken. And the violence caused such silence. Who are we mistaken? [Pre-Chorus] But you see, it's not me, it's not my family. In...
- Overview
- Characteristics
- History
zombie, undead creature frequently featured in works of horror fiction and film. While its roots may possibly be traced back to the zombi of the Haitian Vodou religion, the modern fictional zombie was largely developed by the works of American filmmaker George A. Romero.
Although the word zombie has been applied to different types of creatures, they generally share a few defining characteristics, perhaps most importantly a lack of free will. Zombies are usually wholly subordinate, either to an outside force, such as a sorcerer, or to an overwhelming desire, such as the need for human flesh or revenge or simply to do violence. Another important distinction made by some is that a zombie is the animated corpse of a single being, usually a human. Zombies are frequently depicted as shambling and rotting, although in some instances their bodies may be preserved, especially when magic is involved, and they may sometimes display superhuman characteristics, such as increased strength and speed.
Zombies may be created in a variety of ways. Early depictions, drawing from Haitian Vodou, often represented witchcraft as a means for reviving corpses. Haitian zombi are said to be created by maleficent priests or sorcerers for the purpose of doing their bidding. There are two potential parts to the Vodou process: first, a zombi astral is created by removing part of a person’s soul. Then this part of the soul may be used for further magic, including the revivification of the person’s corpse, or zombi corps cadavre. Methods of zombification developed in fiction include radiation exposure and contagion. Especially noteworthy in the latter case is the danger of a so-called “zombie apocalypse,” in which the eventual zombification of the human population through virulence seems inevitable. Zombies are often depicted as proliferating by killing or infecting others—usually by biting—who then become zombies themselves.
The word zombie itself entered the English lexicon in the 18th or 19th century, often attributed to British writer Robert Southey, although the idea of the walking dead had existed in various cultures for centuries. The idea of zombism in fiction is widely believed to have been galvanized by the nonfiction book The Magic Island, a travelogue of Haiti by William Seabrook, first published in 1929, which detailed his observations of Vodou zombi. Three years after The Magic Island’s publication, the first feature-length zombie film, White Zombie—inspired by the book and by a stage play called Zombie—was released. In it a lovesick man conspires with a sorcerer (played by Bela Lugosi) to turn the object of his affections into a zombie just after she weds someone else, so that he may have control of her. The woman “dies” and is given a funeral but later rises from the dead through the powers of witchcraft. More Vodou-influenced zombie films followed, including a loose sequel to White Zombie called Revolt of the Zombies (1936), King of the Zombies (1941), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). As the United States entered the atomic age, zombie and alien stories began to merge, as in the infamous Ed Wood-directed cult film Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) and Invisible Invaders (1959), in which aliens attempt to enslave the dead. By the 1940s zombies had also become a regular feature in comic books and pulp magazines, and it was in these media that they came to be depicted as rotting corpses rather than preserved ones.
A major turning point in zombie lore came with American filmmaker George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). This low-budget film—inspired in part by I Am Legend (1954), a novel by Richard Matheson that depicts vampires driven solely by a desire for blood—solidified the zombie concept that would persist for decades. The film revolves around a farmhouse full of people under attack by the walking dead, risen by vague means involving radiation. Romero intended the film to be more of a social commentary than a monster movie, and the narrative centres on the inability of the living to cooperate to save themselves from the undead threat. Ironically, the word zombie was not uttered in Night of the Living Dead—Romero himself was not influenced directly by Haitian folklore, and the creatures were simply referred to as “ghouls” or “flesh-eaters.”
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Romero revisited both his ghouls, now known as zombies thanks to fans, and his social commentary—this time about the ills of consumerism—with Dawn of the Dead (1978), in which a handful of living people attempt to escape the undead by hiding in a shopping mall. He followed up with a number of related films over the next several decades: Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009).
Night of the Living Dead opened the doors for hundreds of zombie appearances in the years that followed, especially in the 1980s. These included an unauthorized Italian sequel to Dawn of the Dead, Zombi 2 (1979; also released as Zombie), and many more Italian zombie films that followed in its wake. In the United States the popular film Friday the 13th, which featured the zombielike villain Jason Voorhees, hit screens in 1980. In 1983 Michael Jackson released the video for his song “Thriller,” a horror-filled romp that featured dancing zombies. Zombie comedy began to gain steam, and humorous zombie films such as Night of the Comet (1984) followed. Romero’s Night coauthor, John Russo, worked on the first in a series of spin-offs of their seminal work, The Return of the Living Dead, which was released in 1985 and in turn spawned a number of sequels. In addition to being a popular zombie comedy, Return contributed the hunger for human brains to zombie lore.
- Alison Eldridge
Sep 19, 2023 · ‘Zombie’: The Story Behind The Cranberries’ Deathless Classic. A furious anti-terrorism lament, ‘Zombie’ found the The Cranberries unleashing ‘the most aggressive song we’d written.’. Published...
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