ZOMBIES

Chris Ferbrache wonders why zombie movies have remained so popular for almost a century.

These days you can hardly turn on the television or watch a movie without seeing slack-jawed zombies stumbling or dragging their limbs after a horrified person. For those who are short on reading material, the New York Times bestseller, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks (2003) holds critical information on how to survive the zombie apocalypse. Zombie fever doesn’t stop there. Gun enthusiasts may shoot bleeding zombie targets at their local shooting range. In Canada, you can even learn CPR with the help of zombies from the Heart and Stroke Foundation. And when you are done, you can watch the all-time most popular television series, AMC’s The Walking Dead, which had almost twenty million viewers a week.

If you’re unsure why zombies are so popular, you’re not alone. To wrap our heads round the current zombie invasion, we must start at the beginning.

The Haitian Zonbi

In the eighteenth century, African slaves were brought to the French colony of SaintDomingue, now known as Haiti. Forced to convert to Christianity, the slaves developed a way of preserving elements of their indigenous faith while living under religious suppression, by merging African religious traditions with Christianity to form what became known as Voodoo. More than a mere set of rituals, Voodoo rehearsed and reinforced the values of the oppressed.