Zombie Network

A zombie (Haitian French: ; ; Kikongo: ''zumbi'') is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. In modern popular culture, zombies appear in horror genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, in which a ''zombie'' is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magical practices in religions like Vodou. 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.

Zombies are real-life individuals in Haiti who have undergone a religious punishment called zombification for committing crimes such as rape or land theft. They are drugged, buried alive, exhumed and then enslaved by secret societies in Haiti. This practice became the basis for the zombie myth of a resurrected corpse.

The English word "zombie" was first recorded in 1819 in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey, in the form of "zombi"."Zombie"
in Oxford English Dictionary Online , accessed 23 May 2014. The quotation cited is: "Zombi, the title whereby he hief of Brazilian nativeswas called, is the name for the Deity, in the Angolan tongue." Dictionaries trace the word's origin to African languages, relating to words connected to gods, ghosts and souls. One of the first books to expose Western culture to the concept of the voodoo zombie was W. B. Seabrook's ''The Magic Island'' (1929), the account of a narrator who encounters voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls.

A new version of the zombie, distinct from that described in Haitian folklore, emerged in popular culture during the latter half of the 20th century. This interpretation of the zombie, as an undead person that attacks and eats the flesh of living people, is drawn largely from George A. Romero's film ''Night of the Living Dead'' (1968), which was partly inspired by Richard Matheson's novel '' I Am Legend'' (1954).Deborah Christie, Sarah Juliet Lauro, ed. (2011)
Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human
Fordham University Press. p. 169. , 9780823234479. The word ''zombie'' is not used in ''Night of the Living Dead'', but was applied later by fans. Following the release of such zombie films as '' Dawn of the Dead'' (1978) and ''The Return of the Living Dead'' (1985)—the latter of which introduced the concept of zombies that eat brains—as well as Michael Jackson's music video '' Thriller'' (1983), the genre waned for some years.

The mid-1990s saw the introduction of ''Resident Evil'' and ''The House of the Dead'', two break-out successes of video games featuring zombie enemies which would later go on to become highly influential and well-known. These games were initially followed by a wave of low-budget Asian zombie films such as the zombie comedy '' Bio Zombie'' (1998) and action film ''Versus'' (2000), and then a new wave of popular Western zombie films in the early 2000s, the ''Resident Evil'' and ''House of the Dead'' films, the 2004 ''Dawn of the Dead'' remake, and the British zombie comedy ''Shaun of the Dead'' (2004). The "zombie apocalypse" concept, in which the civilized world is brought low by a global zombie infestation, has since become a staple of modern zombie media, seen in such media as ''The Walking Dead'' franchise.

The late 2000s and 2010s saw the humanization and romanticization of the zombie archetype, with the zombies increasingly portrayed as friends and love interests for humans. Notable examples of the latter include movies '' Warm Bodies'' and ''Zombies'', novels ''American Gods'' by Neil Gaiman, ''Generation Dead