Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2023 February 16

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February 16

Zombie Movies

Hello, I am interested in knowing more about the origin of Zombie movies. Could anyone point me to some references about zombie movies? Thank you! Tv In My Eye (talk) 04:02, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

You can start here Zombie film#History. MarnetteD|Talk 04:18, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

The term and concept Zombie originated in Haitian folklore well over 200 years ago. The concept entered the mainstream of American popular culture with the 1968 George Romero made low budget horror film Night of the Living Dead. This film fell into the public domain, so many other filmmakers have used it as an inspiration without any legal problems. Cullen328 (talk) 04:23, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Maybe not the actual term, but the concept was alive and well in the mid-1950s Ed Wood 'classic', Plan 9 from Outer Space. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:18, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Preceding Zombie movies there were zombie stories and books, on the fringe of science fiction. I read plenty of such things in the early 1960s, but none had the literary impact for their names or details to remain in my conscious memory. HiLo48 (talk) 00:01, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Did these stories precede White Zombie?  --Lambiam 12:48, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Most notably, Romero's monsters set the modern expectation of zombies to be ghouls: eaters of human flesh. In fact, they're not called zombies in the film at all. Earlier movies, like the Hammer classic, The Plague of the Zombies still used the original meaning of zombie: an undead slave that could be used for labour. They were still horrifying because they couldn't be reasoned with and were repulsive, etc., but the emphasis was different. It's a testament to NOTLD's impact that it would be virtually impossible to make a film today dealing with "true" zombies because the expectation of them to be flesh-eaters (or brain eaters) is now so firmly entrenched). Matt Deres (talk) 14:52, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

"The concept entered the mainstream of American popular culture with the 1968 George Romero made low budget horror film" I am not certain about that. American comic books have been using zombie characters since the 1940s. DC Comics' zombie character Soiomon Grundy dates to 1944. The Disney character Bombie the Zombie by Carl Barks dates to Four Color #238] (1949): "A zombie gives Donald a poisoned doll that was intended for Uncle Scrooge, who looked like Donald when the doll was given to the Zombie some seventy years before. Donald--followed by the nephews and "Bombie the Zombie"--goes to Africa to persuade the witch doctor Foola Zoola to give him the antidote for the poison, which is supposed to shrink its victims to the size of a rat." Marvel Comics' eponymous Zombie/Simon William Garth dates to 1953. Dimadick (talk) 05:16, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

But the OP asked about zombie movies, not zombie comic books, Dimadick. Movies have been in the mainstream of American popular culture for 110 years at least, maybe longer. Comic books were very far from the mainstream of American popular culture in 1968, although their influence has certainly increased since Superman (1978 film) which brought superhero comic book heroes and villains into the Hollywood mainstream. It seems indisputable to me that Romero created the current zombie movie genre. Cullen328 (talk) 06:00, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

The point still stands, though: NOTLD didn't bring zombies to US cinema for the first time; it just changed the way zombies are defined. Matt Deres (talk) 02:27, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

I Am Legend (novel):

I Am Legend is a 1954 post-apocalyptic horror novel by American writer Richard Matheson that was influential in the modern development of zombie and vampire literature and in popularizing the concept of a worldwide apocalypse due to disease.

In I Am Legend, the "vampires" share more similarities with zombies, and the novel influenced the zombie genre and popularized the concept of a worldwide zombie apocalypse.[7]

Although the idea has now become commonplace, a scientific origin for vampirism or zombies was fairly original when written.[8

Although referred to as "the first modern vampire novel", it is as a novel of social theme that I Am Legend made a lasting impression on the cinematic zombie genre, by way of director George A. Romero, who acknowledged its influence and that of its original cinematic adaptation, The Last Man on Earth (1964), upon his seminal film Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Basically "zombie movies" feature the Matheson vampires with a Haitian name.

--Error (talk) 18:12, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

"Basically "zombie movies" feature the Matheson vampires with a Haitian name." Not really. Our articles on zombies in fiction simply credits Matheson with practically inventing the "zombie apocalypse". Most 1950s-era depictions of zombies as "uncontrollable, mostly mute, primitive and extremely violent" are derivatives of an older work: the short story Herbert West–Reanimator (1921-1922) by H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was the first writer to depict zombies "as scientifically reanimated corpses, with animalistic and uncontrollable temperaments." Believe it or not, the scientific origin of zombies was still a fresh idea in the 1920s. Dimadick (talk) 05:34, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

That article says (with citations needed) that Lovecraft wrote it as a parody of Frankenstein (1818). In the original Frankenstein, the monster is "Intelligent and articulate". That article's "Literary influences" mentions References to the French Revolution run through the novel; a possible source may lie in François-Félix Nogaret [fr]'s Le Miroir des événemens actuels, ou la Belle au plus offrant (1790), a political parable about scientific progress featuring an inventor named Frankésteïn, who creates a life-sized automaton.[18] Reading Frankenstein's monster, it seems that the image of the monster as a brute comes from Frankenstein (1931 film). --Error (talk) 14:09, 22 February 2023 (UTC)