Who has never watched a film or series in which the living dead attack the people of the city in an attempt to devour them? This narrative is so successful in pop culture that it is present in countless types of media besides cinema, such as horror games, books, and comics. But what is the origin of the myth? And who was the first person to describe these cannibals’ obsession with human flesh? Check out these and other interesting facts below.
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Where did the zombies we see in films and series come from?
According to what the Oxford English Dictionary points out, the word “zombie” has its origins in West Africa and was first recorded in 1819 in the English language. One piece of information that proves this point is the existence of the word “nzambi” which designates a specific god of the Voodoo religion, considered to be a “spirit of a dead person”.
Later, people of this religion were trafficked to other countries and forced to serve as slaves. In this way, along with them, their cultural characteristics were also transported and spread throughout the world: in America, a fear of the famous “living dead” spread, seen as spirits of deceased people, directly based on African and Amerindian cultures.
In Haiti, “jumbi” became “zombi”, related to the death and suffering experienced by enslaved black people, but also to designate, in general, a spirit or ghost. The myth also became a trick, used by colonizers to manipulate slaves and force them to obey; otherwise, they would hire sorcerers to turn black people into zombies.
Despite the end of slavery, there was still a strong belief that a person could be possessed by a spirit and turned into a zombie. In fact, Haitian culture has a character called the “bokor sorcerer”, who has the power to transform people into zombies.
Over the years, the term “zombie” was popularized in North America as a fictional creature and the first film from this region to tell a story with a zombie was the work “White Zombie”, widely publicized after American soldiers returned to their country. during the military occupation in Haiti.
And over time, the myth of the zombie became popular worldwide and gave rise to the development of various media, such as films, series, documentaries, books, games, and even comics.
