A zombie is a mythical undead, corporeal revenant formed by reanimating a body. Zombies are most frequently seen in horror and fantasy films. A zombie is a dead corpse reanimated through different ways, most often sorcery like voodoo, according to Haitian legend. In modern portrayals of the reanimation of the dead, science-fictional means like carriers, radiation, mental illnesses, vectors, viruses, parasites, scientific mishaps, and so on are used instead of magic.

The English term “zombie” was first documented in the form of “zombie” in a history of Brazil written by poet Robert Southey in 1819. The word’s origin is West African, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which links it to the Kongo terms Zambia (god) and zumbi or number (fetish). Some authors relate it to the Kongo words Mumbai (Mumbai) (ghost, revenant, corpse with soul) and (nvumbi) (ghost, revenant, corpse with soul) (body without a soul). The related term number is defined as a soul in a 1903 Kimbundu”Portuguese dictionary, while it is defined as a “spirit that is thought to traverse the world to punish the living” in a later Kimbundu”Portuguese dictionary. W. B. Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929), a sensationalized tale of a narrator encountering voodoo cults in Haiti and their revived thralls, was one of the first works to introduce the notion of the voodoo zombie to Western society.

During the second part of the twentieth century, a new version of the zombie, separate from that depicted in Haitian mythology, appeared in popular culture. This zombie interpretation is based on George A. Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, which was inspired in part by Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (1954). The term “zombie” isn’t mentioned in Night of the Living Dead, but it was coined by fans later on. The zombie genre faded for a few years after films like Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Michael Jackson’s music video Thriller (1983).

With its more scientific and action-oriented approach and introduction of fast-running zombies in the late 1990s, the video games Resident Evil, and The House of the Dead evolved the zombie stereotype, resulting in a rebirth of zombies in popular culture. These games were followed by a wave of low-budget Asian zombie films, such as the zombie comedy Bio Zombie (1998) and the action film Versus (2000), and then a new wave of popular Western zombie films in the early 2000s, including 28 Days Later (2002), the Resident Evil and House of the Dead films, and the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, as well as a new wave of popular Asian zombie films, such as the zombie comedy Bio Zombie (1998) and the action film Versus (2000) (2004). The notion of a “zombie apocalypse,” in which the civilized world is brought to its knees by a worldwide zombie outbreak, has since become a fixture of modern popular culture.

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