Though various concepts of the dead rising date back thousands of years in many different cultural variations, the American depiction of the zombie was borrowed from 19th-century Haitian voodooism.
The rural Haitian spiritual belief system — which was largely formulated by the millions of West African slaves the French brought to the country in the 17th century — held that those who died from an unnatural cause like murder would “linger” at their graves. During this time, the corpse would be susceptible to being revived by a bokor, or witch doctor, who would keep it as a personal slave, granting it no agency. The Haitians called this creature — suspended in some ambiguous state between life and death — a zombi.
After staging a successful slave rebellion and gaining independence from France in 1804, Haiti was demonized by the Western world as a threat to imperialism. Voodoo culture was perceived to be a signifier of the country’s “savage inferiority” — and when the United States occupied Haiti in 1915, Catholic missionaries set out to dismantle it. [...]
Until the 1940s, zombies were largely a reflection of the fears of voodooism and blackness. But as the political landscape of America shifted, the creatures soon acquired new symbolism. [...]
The zombies in Dawn of the Dead underscore the fears of capitalism and mindless consumption that racked the late 1970s. Here, the zombies are consumers, aimlessly roaming through shops: “This was an important place in their lives,” one survivor comments on the zombies’ presence in the mall.
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