Zombie
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- The Zombies were a British psychedelic rock band in the 1960s.
A zombie or zombi is a dead person who has returned to life as a walking corpse (the living dead). Things that have been "re-animated" are called undead. The Zombie myth came from the Caribbean.
Zombies have become very popular in horror movies. They are dead creatures that have been brought back to life by science or some spell, and eat the flesh or brain of living people.
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[change] Voodoo Zombies
A Voodoo sorcerer or a bokor can bring dead people back to life. The now zombie is under the control of the sorcerer because zombies have no free will. The idea of this is that a zombie is a trapped human soul, and if a sorcerer can catch it, he becomes more powerful.
[change] Examples
Wade Davis, a Canadian ethnobotanist (someone who studies what effect plants have on people), wrote about zombies in two books, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988). Davis went to Haiti in 1982 found out and wrote about how a living person can be turned into a zombie by two special powders being rubbed into a wound. The first powder brought a 'death-like' state because of a certain poison in it, called tetrodotoxin. Tetrodotoxin is the same deadly poison found in the Japanese pufferfish. At just the right amount, it can make a person almost die, but not quite. The second powder, puts the person in a zombie-like state where they seem to have no will of their own. Many people still don't believe what Davis wrote about, but in Haiti, lots of people recognized the "zombie drugs". This could mean that, while the drugs could have no effect on the person, the person may believe so strongly that they work that they become zombie-like, but psychologically, rather than physically.
[change] Middle Age zombies
In the Middle Ages, lots of people believed that the souls of the dead could come back as ghosts and haunt the living. Usually because of a crime that the living person committed. Sometimes, the crime was so bad that the ghost could actually take on a phsyical shape and attack the living.
[change] Examples
In Mesopotamian mythology, Ishtar, the goddess of love and fertility once said in anger:
- "Father give me the Bull of Heaven,
- So he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling.
- If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,
- I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
- I will smash the doorposts, and leave the doors flat down,
- and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
- And the dead will outnumber the living!"
[change] Zombies in Films
Zombies appear a lot in horror and fantasy films. The stereotypical zombie is a mindless, clumsy corpse which eats human flesh. Zombies can not be called cannibals because they do not eat each other, only humans. The first zombie references appeared in the 1600s and have since appeared in lots of films and books.
[change] Characteristics
In zombie films, zombies are almost always:
- Mobile but technically dead, without a heartbeat or other vital signs
- In a decaying state, with discolored skin and eyes
- Non-communicative, groaning and howling instead of speaking
- Unemotional, with no mercy toward victims
- Hungry for human flesh (zombies ignore animals like dogs or cats)
- Clumsy and violent
- Vulnerable to destruction of the brain, which kills them
- Uneffected by injuries, even normally fatal ones, as long as they don't destroy the brain
- Contagious, you can become a zombie through a bite or claw mark
- Does not attack other zombies, leading to swarms of zombies
