452 – History of Zombie Fiction

Oct 8, 2023

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

The undead rise from the grave to eat your brains, but why? When did they start doing that, and what’s the history behind it? Do zombies even eat brains anymore? This week we’re looking at all these questions as we examine the history of zombies in fiction, from the latest prestige fungus shows to stories that actually predate the introduction of “zombie” into white people’s vocabulary. Listen on, and enhance your braaaaaaiiiiiiiiins!

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Ace. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.

[Intro Music]

Wes: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is…

Chris: Chris.

Wes: …and…

Oren: Oren.

Wes: And we begin today’s podcast with an obligatory “braaaaains!”

Oren: Braaaaaains!

Wes: Today we’re talking about zombies. Specifically zombie fiction, a history thereof.

Oren: Mmm, history brains. The most delicious kind of brain.

Wes: The most delicious kind. I do feel though that we need to begin by simply asking, what is zombie? Because corpses have been rising from the dead in fiction for a really long time. I was reading that the Greeks were worried about revenants springing up from the grounds, exhumed coffins had those bodies laying in there with stones pinning their arms and legs down, right? Because otherwise they would just walk right out of these shallow graves, I guess.

Chris: Is Frankenstein’s monster a zombie, for instance?

Wes: Great question. Great question. And I think that is, I’m inclined to say that before basically the middle of the 20th century, there were no zombies. And then zombie fiction, boom, started with I Am Legend and just went from there.

Oren: I have some dates for us.

Wes: Okay.

Oren: Alright. So, first of all, trying to do a history of zombie movies is an exercise in futility because there are so many, going back to the 20s. There are hundreds if not thousands of them, and it’s really hard to tell who’s influencing who. Some of them are lost, we don’t even know what some of them were anymore. But, we can pretty much pin the popularization of the term zombie, at least according to a PBS documentary that I watched, and I have no reason not to trust them, to William Seabrook and his book, The Magic Island. Now, we’ve had corpse reanimation before that. In fact, there are some stories that were published shortly before.

Chris: What year was this?

Oren: This was 1929 and there are a few stories published before then which we now call zombie stories, but certainly did not call themselves that and were not really called that at the time. Reanimator, for example, by Lovecraft is generally now considered a zombie story, but it’s a few years older than this. Basically, what happened is that Seabrook did a cultural appropriation on people from Haiti and the Caribbean.

Chris: So he was actually using the term zombie.

Oren: Yes.

Chris: Okay, that’s interesting because Night of the Living Dead, which is what people usually cite as the origin of zombies in 1968, they were not using the term zombie, they were using the term ghouls. And then George Romero said that basically the term zombies had been applied by film critics. So when he did the next zombie movie, by that time he was, okay, all the film critics are calling them zombies, I guess I’ll call them zombies.

Wes: It must have been that some of them had read that book, right?

Chris: Mhm. That would explain where they got the term from, because otherwise it’s a little strange. I don’t think Romero felt like it was much of a fit.

Oren: Okay, here’s the thing you have to understand about Romero, is that he’s a big ol’ liar. If not a liar, he is definitely in denial about a lot of things, because, for example, he also insists that he intended no racial commentary on the film, a film in the 60s in which a black man shoots a bunch of white zombies to protect other white people and is then killed by a white militia coming to save them. No political or racial implications were meant by that at all. Stop saying they were. I’m not saying he’s lying, actually. I’m saying that he does not realize where his influences come from. It seems extremely unlikely that he had no idea about any, or that there was nothing at work here. And zombie movies were already extremely popular when Night of the Living Dead came out. They had been, zombie movies had already gone through at least one cycle of boom and bust by then. They had gotten so popular that they became silly and were spoofed. And this all happened in the 40s.

Chris: Here’s a question for you. Okay, so the earlier zombie movies, before I Am Legend, did they have a zombie apocalypse?

Oren: There are so many of them, but usually no. Before I Am Legend, the default was, again, these were much more obviously appropriated from spiritual beliefs. And again, they were not sincere most of the time, and they were certainly not accurate, but they were much more often going to be a single person controlling a group of zombies. The idea of the zombie apocalypse doesn’t become popularized until later. I Am Legend, you mentioned, is one of the big ones, and then of course Night of the Living Dead really helped to popularize it.

Chris: For anyone who’s not very familiar with I Am Legend, this is a 1954 novel, and it’s actually about vampires, but it made waves because of its post-apocalyptic setting, and it has vampires in a setting that’s very much like a lot of our modern zombie movies, where the world is just overrun by vampires and there’s one dude left. And the vampires are not active during the day, which kind of allows him to go out and just stake a whole bunch of them and kill them at once. But they’re very much vampires. They’re susceptible to garlic and everything. So it’s not actually about zombies, but this is the book that Romero said was his inspiration for Night of the Living Dead.

Oren: Yeah, and I’m sure it was, right? I’m sure that there was also inspiration from that book, but Romero can’t pretend he wasn’t at all influenced by the incredibly popular film genre that existed at the same time.

Chris: What he did then is he took the zombies from earlier films and this kind of post-apocalypse that was overrun by the undead from I Am Legend and combined them together.

Oren: There’s even a funny little nod in the movie to previous zombie films that were popular at the time because we go through phases of what causes the zombies, and prior to Night of the Living Dead, a very popular one had been radiation. Before that, it was usually magic, because, again, we were more directly stealing from its spiritual roots. But there was a period in the late 40s and 50s when radiation zombies were very popular. I cannot imagine why. And even though Night of the Living Dead doesn’t specifically say what caused the zombies, there is some dialogue about radiation from a space probe. It was clearly a bit of hat tipping there, regardless of what Romero is saying.

Wes: I really think we should bring back radiation zombies, the virus stuff is so passé.

Oren: What I’m curious about is are we going to get a wave of fungus zombies?

Wes: Yes.

Chris: We might, but at the same time, I feel that we can’t really… It’s worth a little novelty, but I think that novelty is going to get tapped out pretty fast.

Wes: But I think kind of the point of the zombie is also the gross out. Actually, no, no, I just fear what’s next after mushroom zombies.

Oren: That is definitely a trend that if you look at, again, very broadly, there are always films that either are ahead of their time or buck the trends, but very broadly, zombies have gotten grosser over time, right? Because originally, again, the older zombie movies stick closer to the idea of an undead laborer. Or just a guy that you order around, or a lady who wasn’t into your affection, so you make her a zombie to play piano for you or whatever. These are all real zombie movies I’m referencing. They’re great, they’re not, but anyway. That’s another thing that Night of the Living Dead is generally considered to be very influential on, is making the zombies real gross. And having them eat people, and it was not the first one to do that, but it was certainly a very popular one that did that.

Chris: So Oren, did you see, do you know of any early film where they ate brains before 1985 with Return of the Living Dead?

Oren: No. Again, there are so many. I can’t say that there wasn’t one, but as far as I know, that’s the first time.

Chris: Of course, at this point, zombies pretty much no longer eat brains.

Wes: They’re less discriminatory, right?

Chris: They still eat brains, but they’re not especially interested in brains. They’ll eat anything.

Oren: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a zombie movie where they actually eat brains. The closest I’ve ever come to a zombie story where they eat brains is Mur Lafferty’s story, where the zombies are just regular creatures like every other kind of magical creature, and they eat brains to stop themselves from becoming gross and undead. And so that was the closest, and so that was obviously a subversion of the expectation. I can’t think of a time I’ve seen a zombie movie where they sincerely go around trying to eat people’s brains.

Chris: Yeah, I think that’s just a little bit restrictive if the only thing the zombies will bite is somebody’s head and then they have to get through the skull.

Wes: I think, like, Night of the Living Dead was like, okay, here’s the story, and it ends with that militia showing up, and definitely not, nothing political for the ending there. But then, Dawn of the Dead, that’s when it really went, like, full zombie-pocalypse scale, and then Return of the Living Dead was like, okay, let’s gross out further by doing brain feasting. There’s definitely something there with just trying to, like, each new zombie installation is like… Up threat, or up gross? And then, fast forward to then, 28 Days Later, which is, okay, what about gross and fast?

Chris: Yeah, it was 28 Days Later when we got fast zombies.

Wes: I think that was, that’s the one I remember, I mean there may have been one before, but I remember that being the first like, fast zombies, because it terrified me.

Oren: Certainly popularizing the fast zombies, right? Again, there are so many zombie movies that trying to find the first one to do anything is like an exercise in futility, but as far as big budget popular ones go, yes, that seems to be the consensus.

Wes: What was really scary about that one, too, not only were the zombies fast, but the infection rate was also so fast. I don’t know, spoilers or anything, but that really nice, like, bearded character who I obviously sympathized with, beard solidarity, looks up and a body in a rafter drips one drop of blood that hits him in the eyeball. And then, moments later, turns into a zombie and they have to kill him. Yeah, that was some scary fast moves.

Chris: Yeah, and I do think that’s a sign that, again, the zombie movies had been losing some of their terror, right? We need to turn up the notch. And then, by 2004, okay, we’ve, we’re just gonna make them funny now. Which, as Oren pointed out, has happened before. But I think it’s a lot easier to identify when a general cultural trend changes, or when something is popularized, than to look and find the very first instance of it. And, Shaun of the Dead…

Wes: Great movie, great movie.

Chris: …in 2004, definitely seems to mark the point at which we start doing a lot of zombie subversions.

Oren: Yeah, the time was right. This has all happened before, it will probably all happen again. Zombies have a remarkably enduring film legacy, and I don’t think that’s going to stop, although I suppose it might, right? Maybe The Last of Us is going to be the last big zombie thing for the next 50 years, I don’t know.

Wes: I don’t know, because Shaun of the Dead accomplished that, but then 10 years later was World War Z. Right. And it’s, okay, we’re going to bring back fast, scary, strong zombies and the military. It suddenly got super serious again.

Chris: Was World War Z a success?

Wes: They tried hard, right? Brad Pitt was brought into it. It made waves when it showed up in theaters. I don’t really think, though, it had a lasting impact because The Walking Dead came to TV, which is not a movie, but had a much bigger cultural impact, I think, for bringing more of a mood to it. World War Z was quite literally named. It’s, it’s like, it’s more like a military type operation movie, which I think pushed it so far in that direction that it lost what really made zombies scary, which is that sense of being almost like on a frontier, and alone, and hunted.

Chris: Right. And The Last of Us definitely uses the drama of the situation. I think one of the reasons there aren’t more zombies in it is because they figured, okay, zombies are actually old now. What’s interesting is looking at how being in a zombie apocalypse affects the people.

Oren: The real monster is maaaaaaan! Yeah, okay, so to answer some World War Z questions that we had. So the movie was financially successful, but was critically panned, surprise, and was generally considered not particularly influential. Like, people didn’t really remember it, it was a very forgettable movie. The book was much more influential, from what I can tell. The book that it’s based on, which has very little to do with the movie, right? They made a lot of changes and changed the entire vibe.

Chris: Yeah, that book is not a book that you can just adapt into a single movie. You could make, since it’s multiple stories, you could take a bunch of stories from the book and make them into separate movies.

Oren: Yeah, because the book is a bunch of vignettes of varying quality that document the initial infection, then the collapse, and then the rebuilding afterwards. And yeah, that would be really hard to make into a movie.

Chris: You could, uh, do a TV show where each vignette is like one episode. And it’s just completely episodic.

Oren: It certainly seems like the book fueled the cultural phenomenon known as the zombie plan. Did you all have that in high school? Anyone?

Chris: Yeah.

Wes: Yeah.

Oren: Everyone was talking about what their zombie plan was.

Wes: Arguing about what weapons you should have, pros and cons of each, yeah.

Oren: And that happened. And I honestly think The Walking Dead is much more influenced by the World War Z book than the World War Z movie is. And heck, The Last of Us is also like that. They’re very different zombies, right? But the idea of this very rigorous approach to whatever causes the zombie infection, and this idea of building the world around it, that’s something that we see in both The Walking Dead and The Last of Us. We also see in all three of them a lot of hand waving, where it’s like, yeah, it’s all perfectly realistic, it all makes sense, until you get to this part of it, don’t look at that part.

This is my favorite part in, from World War Z, the book. They have this section where they’re describing when the army tries to fight the zombies, right? And it’s like, oh wow, the army, they brought anti tank rounds to fight zombies, that doesn’t work, the zombies don’t have tanks, lololol, army logistics, am I right? And it’s like, okay, yeah, that’s pretty funny, but it covers over the fact that they could have just run the zombies over with their Abrams. The Abrams has a wade depth of four feet, so unless there’s enough zombie to cover the entire battlefield in four and a half feet of liquid zombie, then the zombies aren’t winning that fight. So that’s, and The Last of Us does that too, right? Every zombie apocalypse story does that. They draw your attention with something that seems credible, and then they gloss over the parts that don’t make sense. And that’s fine, right? That’s the tradition of the zombie story. I’m not calling out World War Z here. I just find it interesting.

Chris: One of the issues is that a distinguishing feature of zombies is that they’re not smart. Right? They’re not smart enough to actually act strategically, and that does limit their threat level. And because if we make them smart enough to coordinate, then they’re just not zombies anymore.

Oren: And there have been several attempts at smart zombies, and so far none of them have been particularly influential. The podcast We’re Alive was very popular. It was one of the first really big fiction podcasts, and it’s a zombie story, and… by really late, it starts to introduce smart zombies, which is incidentally also when I stopped listening. And I think there are some smart zombies in that, oh gosh, the Zack Snyder movie, the Michael Bay, there’s a Netflix zombie movie where they have to go to L. A. and steal a safe that’s full of zombies. And I think there are some smart zombies in there. One of the Romero movies actually features a smart zombie who can use tools and teaches the zombies combat tactics, which is pretty scary, but I think Chris is right. In general, that has just never caught on because that’s not what people want from zombies.

Wes: One thing on smart zombies that I was thinking about was Marvel Comics did that run about Marvel zombies. And what I liked about that one is yes, they turned into zombies, but they were effectively themselves except the hunger gnawed at them. So if they weren’t eating human flesh. They became increasingly more zombie-like, right? And I’m talking like 28 Days Later zombie because they’re all superheroes and super powered, too, so really fast, still very strong. But I remember a particularly gross section of that was that Black Panther got captured by Dr. Pym, who was a zombie. But he had, like, just eaten, and so he still had his brain, and with his smarts, he caught Black Panther, and then kept him so that he could study the condition, but also have a snack every now and then to keep his mind focused. I was like, oh, this is grossing me out. Well done!

Oren: Mission accomplished.

Chris: It might be worth mentioning that there is, of course, with zombie subversions, protagonist zombies. And then usually that’s where we get some level, but yes, usually like iZombie, definitely follows a trend that you have to eat brains and if you don’t eat brains, then you become mindless. There is an interesting TV show called The Strain by Del Toro that has a combination. They’re like a cross between vampires and zombies where there’s a kind of an infection like a plague, but it’s caused by vampirism. So you have the boss vampire at the top that creates these parasites that infect people and then they become zombies. It’s an interesting way to combine it so that you have an intelligent boss. And some intelligent villains, but at the same time, at the low level, people are more like zombies than vampires.

Oren: Yeah, having some kind of smarter, higher level villain that controls the zombies to a certain extent, I think that’s doable. I think you can do that. I think making the average zombie smart is where you’re running into problems, because at that point it just, it becomes too different. It’s like making a dragon that doesn’t have wings or a breath attack. At that point, it’s starting to miss too many of the qualities that we want it to have, right?

Wes: With both options, it completely alters the mood, right? Depending on what you’re offering, because we can talk about how some zombie films and stories might be parallels for, I don’t know, climate change or any kind of global destruction or something like that. But the second you introduce a puppet master, that kind of situation, suddenly it’s just, it’s not about that. It’s about a bad evil sorcerer. Who just raises the dead and doesn’t use it for a good necro industrial complex.

Oren: It can still be political commentary. It can be about how rude, uh, people with darker skin than us are coming to steal our light skinned women.

Chris: Oh…

Oren: Not an uncommon zombie story in the old days. Uh, fortunately, we’re a little less blatant about that nowadays.

Wes: You mentioned Reanimator, which I think is an interesting Lovecraft story. Because I like the approach, it’s a frustrating story to read because it’s one of the few that I think Lovecraft actually really got paid for and it was serialized, so like at the start of each section, it recaps what happened before, and it’s not always super accurate. Which I think is hilarious. But like the point of that is that Herbert West, the Reanimator, is trying to successfully reanimate a corpse. And, like, hilarious tagline is he keeps saying that it just, the specimen just wasn’t fresh enough. And you can see, like, where it’s going with him starting to just murder people to try to bring them back perfectly. And I like that push of just, oh no, foul science. We try to learn too much and it bites us, right? It’s just this guy that’s just like, killing people to bring them back to life perfectly, but at the end, he can’t do it, and so all of his creations come back as zombies and take him out. I’m like, okay. But I like the push of that story, of just, I’m not trying to make zombies, I’m trying to bring people back from the dead perfectly. And I thought that made it a little bit more compelling.

Oren: Yeah, that’s not a super common element in zombie stories these days. I don’t know, maybe just the idea of casting medical science as the bad guy has fallen out of favor with mainstream film producers. Maybe vaccine conspiracy theories made that a little too real, and people were like, let’s not endorse that viewpoint.

Chris: But you could take it from a magic perspective too, like Buffy, for instance, had a storyline like that. After Buffy’s mother dies, Dawn is eager to bring her back to life and doesn’t care, doesn’t want to look at the fine print for the spell she’s casting.

Wes: Yeah.

Chris: For instance, so it’s the idea of carelessness and then here’s your karmic consequence. Of course, with magic, you’ve got all this, oh, you’re disrupting the natural order and life and death is like the one thing that magic can’t do. Everything else…

Oren: Look, it can turn you into a goose, but it can’t cure your cancer, okay? It just can’t do it.

Wes: Maybe that’s why fungal zombies are popular now, because death and fungus is repurposing death into new life, and so thus completes the cycle.

Oren: Yeah!

Wes: You’re not violating anything, it’s fine.

Oren: Very pretty, too.

Chris: I loved how after The Last of Us, there were all these articles about what this fungus it’s inspired by can and actually can’t do. Right? Like, people were wondering if it was capable of animating humans. It’s like, no. No, no. It makes ants move a little bit, okay? It’s very different.

Wes: Yeah, I think it’s, I think they specifically call it Cordyceps, as, like, the mushrooms, and I have that in the coffee that I regularly drink, and it’s just a nice additive.

Oren: Delicious!

Wes: So far, I could be an intelligent zombie, for all I know, but I’m not falling, I’m not falling apart.

Oren: Zombies are known for doing repetitive tasks, and we all show up to do a podcast every few weeks, so what other explanation is there? I did have fun explaining to a few friends that the new zombies in Last of Us are not any more realistic than the zombie virus, because the Last of Us zombies have as much in common with the Cordyceps fungus as 28 Days Later zombies do with rabies. Right, it’s like, there’s a connection, but it’s pretty slim. I am really curious to think about what old types of zombies might make a reappearance. I don’t think radiation zombies are coming back, that’s my gut feeling. I think that’s a little too goofy nowadays.

Wes: Yeah, radiation in general. It seems like it had its time, and I don’t know, it’s just kind of gone.

Oren: It’s interesting because it’s still a big problem.

Wes: Yeah.

Oren: We’re still concerned about radiation, about nuclear weapons and nuclear power. It’s not like that went away, but I think we just got tired of it. Yeah, all right, I guess it’s just here now. I do think that magic zombies have potential. I think you could bring those back. Although, if you… if you did it in the ways that they did it in the 30s and 40s, your movie’s not gonna be in for a good PR time. But I think you could distance it enough from the actual spiritual practices that were first pilfered, that it wouldn’t raise too many hackles.

Chris: How about more zombie music videos? Like Thriller? Clearly we’ve done movies, we’ve done TV shows, it’s time for the zombie music video.

Wes: The power of the zombie music video and the zombie video games, Resident Evil, definitely got it out there. But yeah, it was funny looking into this history of zombies and yeah, Thriller gets so much credit for getting zombies out there into, I don’t know, the zeitgeist.

Oren: Which is, of course, funny because the reason zombies were in Thriller was because they were really big at the time. Michael Jackson didn’t pick zombies out of the ether or because he was like an obscure film nerd. Right? He picked them because they were very popular, and then, of course, that became a lot of people’s first introduction to zombies, and so it’s all connected, it’s all a cycle. Video games definitely help keep zombies alive during periods when they aren’t super popular at the box office or on TV, because video games will always love zombies because video games always need a source of enemies to fight.

Wes: Uncomplicated enemies to kill.

Oren: Zombies are just so flexible in terms of uncomplicated enemies to shoot. And because it’s evolved beyond the standard zombie for video game purposes. So you can make zombies that are giant and zombies that can shoot stuff and they can all be zombies. It’s all fine. I don’t know how well that would work in a TV show, right? If we started doing, like, Left 4 Dead, the TV show, and then the witch showed up, I feel like people would maybe question if that’s really a zombie. But in video game terms, sure.

Wes: It’s a zombie witch!

Chris: Maybe what we need is the fantasy zombie. Except for the problem with that is budget.

Oren: Zombies are also pretty popular in high fantasy. They serve a different purpose there, right? The walkers are basically zombies in Game of Thrones, and depending on what kind of fantasy setting you’re in, right, if you’re in anything that’s even kind of D&D related or adjacent, a zombie is a low level enemy you beat when you’re leveling up in the noob zone. But for something that’s more realistic, they can be a serious threat. Especially since you have to fight them with swords and you don’t have any Abrams tanks to run them over up to a depth of four feet.

Chris: But it’s true, every high fantasy story just refers to zombies as something else.

Oren: Yeah, that’s a pretty popular thing now, right? The Walking Dead never calls them zombies. I don’t think Last of Us ever calls them zombies. I think that’s just a trend. Yeah, we all know, we all call them zombies, but no one in the universe does.

Chris: Because we’re trying to pretend that zombie fiction doesn’t exist in that universe.

Oren: Yeah, I think that’s just a defense to explain why none of the characters are genre savvy about zombies.

Wes: That makes sense.

Chris: Yeah, also I feel like tying it to pop culture, if you’ve got something like Shaun of the Dead, where it’s subversive and flippant, then that works much better. But if you want something that is supposed to be serious, I think just bringing up pop culture zombies when zombies are supposed to be real in the setting is going to create a clash of moods.

Oren: Alright, so we’re getting close to the end of time here, but I do want to bring up one weird historical fact that I’ve discovered. Which is, so Wikipedia has lists of zombie fiction, right, and there’s a lot of zombie movies, as you would expect, and they’re spread out pretty evenly, there’s no period in which we weren’t making zombie movies. But if you go to their list of zombie books, and you organize by date, it’s 1921, Reanimator. 1929, The Magic Island, which was later adapted into the movie White Zombie. And then, the next book isn’t listed until 1976.

Chris: No books!

Oren: Explain this gap in your resume. I’m sure there were zombie books during that time period, but for whatever reason, they didn’t rank high enough for the Wikipedia editors to put them on the list.

Wes: Yeah, I guess so.

Oren: I don’t know if that’s because they actually weren’t popular. Some of the ones that are listed here from the 70s and 80s are extremely obscure. So I don’t know, maybe that’s just a weird Wikipedia error, but for some reason it struck me as very funny. Okay, with that, I think we will call this episode to a close and shamble on off the podcast.

Chris: If you want to feed us some brains, support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: Yeah, brains aren’t cheap, man. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our very brainy existing patrons. First, we have Callie McLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson. She’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.

452 – History of Zombie Fiction

Show Notes

Transcript