Zombie

Modern media depictions of the reanimation of the dead often do not involve magic but rather science fictional methods such as fungi, radiation, gases, diseases, plants, bacteria, viruses, etc.

Notable examples of the latter include movies Warm Bodies and Zombies, novels American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Generation Dead by Daniel Waters, and Bone Song by John Meaney, animated movie Corpse Bride, TV series iZombie and Santa Clarita Diet, manga series Sankarea: Undying Love, and the light novel Is This a Zombie?

[18] Zombies are featured widely in Haitian rural folklore as dead persons physically revived by the act of necromancy of a bokor, a sorcerer or witch.

A zombie astral can also be sealed inside a specially decorated bottle by a bokor and sold to a client to bring luck, healing, or business success.

It was thought that the voodoo deity Baron Samedi would gather them from their grave to bring them to a heavenly afterlife in Africa ("Guinea"), unless they had offended him in some way, in which case they would be forever a slave after death, as a zombie.

[23][24] While most scholars have associated the Haitian zombie with African cultures, a connection has also been suggested to the island's indigenous Taíno people, partly based on an early account of native shamanist practices written by Ramón Pané [es], a monk of the Hieronymite religious order and companion of Christopher Columbus.

If, after the administering of such substances, the person has been buried, the act shall be considered murder no matter what result follows.In 1937, while researching folklore in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston encountered the case of a woman who appeared in a village.

The first, French: coup de poudre ("powder strike"), includes tetrodotoxin (TTX), a powerful and frequently fatal neurotoxin found in the flesh of the pufferfish (family Tetraodontidae).

The psychosis induced by the drug and psychological trauma was hypothesised by Davis to reinforce culturally learned beliefs and to cause the individual to reconstruct their identity as that of a zombie, since they "knew" that they were dead and had no other role to play in the Haitian society.

[42] Symptoms of TTX poisoning range from numbness and nausea to paralysis – particularly of the muscles of the diaphragm – unconsciousness, and death, but do not include a stiffened gait or a deathlike trance.

According to psychologist Terence Hines, the scientific community dismisses tetrodotoxin as the cause of this state, and Davis' assessment of the nature of the reports of Haitian zombies is viewed as overly credulous.

[41] Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing highlighted the link between social and cultural expectations and compulsion, in the context of schizophrenia and other mental illness, suggesting that schizogenesis may account for some of the psychological aspects of zombification.

[51] Zombies have a complex literary heritage, with antecedents ranging from Richard Matheson and H. P. Lovecraft to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein drawing on European folklore of the undead.

[52] Later notable 19th century stories about the avenging undead included Ambrose Bierce's "The Death of Halpin Frayser" and various Gothic Romanticism tales by Edgar Allan Poe.

For example, the original Jonny Quest series (1964) and the James Bond novel Live and Let Die as well as its film adaptation both feature Caribbean villains who falsely claim the voodoo power of zombification to keep others in fear of them.

1985's Re-Animator, loosely based on the Lovecraft story, stood out in the genre, achieving nearly unanimous critical acclaim[73] and becoming a modest success, nearly outstripping Romero's Day of the Dead for box office returns.

[86] In 2013, the AMC series The Walking Dead had the highest audience ratings in the United States for any show on broadcast or cable with an average of 5.6 million viewers in the 18- to 49-year-old demographic.

[81] An exception is the low-budget Japanese zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead (2017), which became a sleeper hit in Japan, and it made box office history by earning over a thousand times its budget.

[89] One Cut of the Dead also received worldwide acclaim, with Rotten Tomatoes stating that it "reanimates the moribund zombie genre with a refreshing blend of formal daring and clever satire".

This causes the outbreak to become an exponentially growing crisis: the spreading phenomenon swamps normal military and law-enforcement organizations, leading to the panicked collapse of civilized society until only isolated pockets of survivors remain, scavenging for food and supplies in a world reduced to a pre-industrial hostile wilderness.

The moment they appear angry or petulant, the second they emit furious velociraptor screeches (as opposed to the correct mournful moans of longing), they cease to possess any ambiguity.

Such stories are often squarely focused on the way their characters react to such an extreme catastrophe, and how their personalities are changed by the stress, often acting on more primal motivations (fear, self-preservation) than they would display in normal life.

Featuring Romero-inspired stories from the likes of Stephen King, the Book of the Dead compilations are regarded as influential in the horror genre and perhaps the first true "zombie literature".

Horror novelist Stephen King has written about zombies, including his short story "Home Delivery" (1990) and his novel Cell (2006), concerning a struggling young artist on a trek from Boston to Maine in hopes of saving his family from a possible worldwide outbreak of zombie-like maniacs.

[102][103] One of the most prominent examples is Generation Dead by Daniel Waters, featuring undead teenagers struggling for equality with the living and a human protagonist falling in love with their leader.

[10] Other novels of this period involving human–zombie romantic relationships include Bone Song by John Meaney, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson, and Amy Plum's Die for Me series;[103] much earlier examples, dating back to the 1980s, are Dragon on a Pedestal by Piers Anthony and Conan the Defiant by Steve Perry.

[117] Over a year later, the developers of the mod created a standalone version of the same game, which was in early access on Steam, and so far has sold 3 million copies since its release in December 2013.

[120] Writing for Scientific American, Kyle Hill praised the 2013 game The Last of Us for its plausibility, basing its zombification process on a fictional strain of the parasitic Cordyceps fungus, a real-world genus whose members control the behavior of their arthropod hosts in "zombielike" ways to reproduce.

[123] This enduring popularity may be attributed, in part, to the fact that zombie enemies are not expected to exhibit significant levels of intelligence, making them relatively straightforward to program.

[127] Michael Jackson's music video Thriller (1983), in which he dances with a troupe of zombies, has been preserved as a cultural treasure by the Library of Congress' National Film Registry.