Fans of the undead are in a frenzy as "Surrounded by the Dead: The Living," the latest spinoff of the post-apocalyptic TV series, recently premiered in the United States.
This is the sixth spinoff and seventh TV series in the franchise, and is set in the period after the events that ended the original series with Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira as Rick and Michonne.
Despite the fact that some critics said that "it's not quite the grandiose return that we were hoping for", some others think that the last incarnation of the series Surrounded by the dead "powerful promotion" for Lincoln and Gurira, but also a real treat for longtime fans.
And there are a lot of them: the original series ran from 2010-2022, and was one of cable's biggest series that fans have returned to repeatedly since then.
Because one thing we know for sure about zombies is that they have a habit of coming back.
We're not done with these creatures yet.
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Where did all this come from anyway?
It's common to trace zombies back to George Romero and his shocking 1968 B-movie - Night of the living dead (Night of the Living Dead).
This movie, in fact, never uses this word literally Z, and in a free way represents an adaptation of a vampire novel I am a legend Richard Matheson in which the last living man tries to find a cure for the vampire virus.
The history of zombie movies requires us to go back in time, to A white zombie by Victor Halperin, which first appeared in 1932 just a few months after those famous Universal Studios adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula.
In the movie White zombie we can encounter a number of harrowing explanations of the zombie phenomenon to American audiences, as it deals with the transfer of traditional beliefs from Caribbean islands such as the French Antilles and Haiti into popular culture.
Today's zombies are the product of those interpretations.
There is some speculation that the word itself has its origins in West African languages - ndzumbi means corpse in the Gabonese Micogo language, while in the Congolese language nzambi means "the spirit of a dead person".
These are the areas from which European slave traders took huge numbers of people across the Atlantic to work on sugar plantations in the Caribbean, which eventually led to France and England becoming world powers.
Africans brought their own religion with them.
French law, however, required all slaves to be converted to Catholicism.
This is how a whole series of complex synthetic religions emerged that creatively combined elements of different traditions - voodoo in Haiti, both religions in Jamaica, Santeria in Cuba.
What is a zombie?
In Martinique and Haiti this is usually a general term for a ghost or any nocturnal apparition that can appear in various forms.
But over time, this term began to describe the belief that a bokor (witch doctor) is able to make a victim appear dead - either through magic, powerful hypnosis or with the help of a secret potion - and then bring her back to life in order not to become his slave, because the soul and will of the victim were captured.
Accordingly, a zombie is the logical fate of a slave - a man without will and name, trapped in the body of a living person, condemned to eternal labor.
Dawn of the dead
The imperial nations of the north became obsessed with Haitian voodoo for a reason.
Conditions in the French colonies were appalling and the death rate among slaves so high that a slave revolt eventually had to overthrow the masters in 1791.
The renamed Haiti (formerly St. Domingo) thus became the first independent black republic after the revolutionary war of 1804.
Since then, the island has been constantly demonized as a place of violence, superstition and death, because its very existence was an affront to European empires.
During the 19th century, there were constant reports of cannibalism, human sacrifice, and dangerous mystical rituals in Haiti.
But it wasn't until the 20th century, when the United States occupied Haiti in 1915, that these stories and rumors began to merge with the term zombie.
American forces embarked on the systematic destruction of the domestic voodoo religion, which, logically, intensified its activities.
It is significant to say that the film White zombie appeared in 1932, just before the end of the American occupation of Haiti (military forces left in 1934).
America came to "modernize" a country it considered backward - but instead returned home bringing that "primitive" superstition.
During the 1920s and 1930s, American tabloid magazines widely published stories about undead vigilantes rising from their graves and chasing their killers.
Once intangible ghosts now existed in the physical form of rotting corpses that littered Haitian cemeteries.
However, it wasn't five-part prose that brought zombies into the pantheon of American supernatural culture.
Two key writers of the late 1920s not only traveled to Haiti but, to add to the sensation, claimed to have encountered real zombies.
And this wasn't just fictional gothic thrills: zombies, they claimed, really existed.
Travel writer, journalist, occultist and alcoholic William Seabrook went to Haiti in 1927 and wrote a book on this trip. Magic island.
Seabrook practiced whirling dances with dervishes in Arabia, and tried to join a cannibalistic tribe in West Africa.
In Haiti, he attended voodoo ceremonies and claimed to have been possessed by the gods.
Then it is in a chapter under the name The dead man works on a sugarcane plantation stated that by mentioning the word zombie, he induced a local to take him to the plantation of the Haitian-American sugar corporation and introduce him to the "zombies" who worked in the fields at night.
"Their eyes were the worst. They looked like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but bulging, unfocused, as if they could see nothing."
Seabrook instantly panicked and thought the superstitious stories were true, before reverting to rational explanations: they were "just ordinary, deranged human beings forced to work in the fields".
This chapter became the basis for the film White zombie, and Seabrook has often claimed that he was responsible for promoting the word zombie into colloquial speech in America.
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A legend that never dies
Another was the respected black writer Zora Nell Hurston.
Many writers who belonged The Harlem Renaissance were interested in Haiti as a model of black independence during the 1920s and 1930s and were vocal opponents of the American occupation of the island.
Hurston was a bit more conservative and thought the occupation was a good thing.
To make matters even more interesting, Hurston was also a professional anthropologist and studied "hudu" in New Orleans (the African-American version of voodoo in those areas), and then spent several months in Haiti training to be a voodoo priestess.
The experiences she gained there terrified her, although her anthropological reports do not say much about it.
Then in her informal travelogue about Haiti called Tell that to my horse (Tell My Horse, 1937) Hurston not only announced that zombies exist, but also that she "had the rare opportunity to see and touch an authentic case".
"I listened to the gurgling sound coming from his throat, and then I did something no one else had ever done - I took a picture of him."
The image of Felicia Felix-Mentor, a "real" zombie, is truly ghostly.
Not long after this encounter, Hurston hurriedly left Haiti, believing that a secret voodoo society wanted to poison her.
If Hurston did meet a zombie in Haiti, the poor woman she photographed with her camera was probably 'socially' dead, rejected by the community and apparently mentally ill (Hurston met her in one of the Haitian mental institutions).
Regardless of everything, the historical trauma of slavery seems to underpin her terrible condition and the appearance of a woman who is left with nowhere to go, to move like living death.
And the series Surrounded by the dead it also seems to echo these historical events.
The real location can rarely be glimpsed in it, but certain groups of survivors also pass through Georgia, through abandoned areas that were once plantations where slaves worked.
To understand the history of zombies, we need to understand the anxiety they create in contemporary American culture where race remains a deathly serious issue.
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