Zombies - Halloween Special

Happy Halloween! We're back from a short hiatus for our epic Halloween special on our favourite brain-munching monsters from world mythology, the Zombie! How do these monsters relate to slavery? How can you avoid being on the wrong end and getting turned? Find out this week!

Transcript

INTRO:
Hello and welcome to Myth Monsters, my name is Erin and I’ll be your host for these little snack bite size podcasts on folklore and mythical monsters from around the world. 

These podcasts focus on the actual cryptids, folklore and mythic monsters from global mythology, rather than focusing on full stories of heroes and their big adventures.

I’ll also be dropping in some references that they have to recent culture and where you can see these represented in modern day content so you can learn more, and get as obsessed as I am about these absolute legends of the mythological world.

Happy Halloween and Samhain to all my lovely listeners and thank you for coming back to Myth Monsters. I hope you had a great spooky day wherever you are in the world!

Sorry for the short hiatus this time, I had a load of big things happen at once! Quick catch up, I had my best friend's wedding, which was a big event and I had a part in - and then I finally got a new job, yay! But it’s 5 days in the office and figuring out when and how I would do episodes when I was so tired was a mission - but now I’ve found some time and bulk written a bunch of stuff so that if it gets a bit much again, I’ve got you covered. 

DESCRIPTION:

For this year’s spooky Halloween special, we’re heading over to a whole bunch of places to look at one of the most famous undead creatures in the world, the legendary, brain-munching Zombies!

So what is a zombie exactly? I’m sure you all know what one is but it’s worth giving a full explanation for the avoidance of doubt in this case. A zombie is a reanimated human corpse, no frills and whistles, just a dead person brought back to semi-life with no concept of pain and completely driven by hunger. 

They are dead people, so they can look like anyone - however, you’d be able to tell them apart as they would usually be visually decaying, moving slowly, eating human flesh and not able to speak. Parts of their body may even slowly fall off or completely rot away, and they’ll still be trying to get around to their next meal, which might just be you. Their skin is typically grey or just a lighter version of their usual skin tone, and sometimes it’s believed that their blood is black or dark brown instead of red.

They have no thoughts or feelings and extremely poor mobility and eyesight (usually) and often hunt in herds. However, they have incredibly sharp hearing and sense of smell, so if you screamed or got too close, they would be able to figure you out. 

Zombies are sometimes thought to be without conscious thought, however, in some depictions, zombies can be smarter, faster or louder. We’ll get more into different types a little later.

But firstly, how does zombie-sm happen - it’s usually through an infection passed through a bite or injury from a zombie to start off with. However, the actual virus is usually from an escape science lab, army base or medical facility where one person started as patient zero, or perhaps they are even breeding zombies, and one gets out. They bite or scratch uninfected people and within a few hours, that person dies and becomes a zombie too. In a few depictions, any injury that can cause death causes a person to become a zombie - but this is post a zombie apocalypse situation with airborne pathogens spreading it. 

Zombies eat humans, specifically, they love the human brain and in some media depictions of them, this is the only word they know. They are completely driven by hunger and know nothing else, so they are typically unable to be controlled or contained because they are just so mobilised by the thought of food. They can’t and won’t eat anything else, and they are not satiated after one bite, they’ll eat a whole person and move onto the next one - but they’ll usually leave just enough so that the corpse can be reanimated as a zombie themselves too.

There are also theories that animals can also turn into zombies, however, this is debated and used in some tackier zombie media - although it would make sense that mammals would all be affected for instance, it’s not something that you widely hear about within this space.

Depending on the type of zombie though, you’re looking at different threat levels - there may be some you can just wait out but others are coming to get you. 

There are a couple of different types, we have the slow and uncoordinated shamblers, who tend to just mope around moaning and the opposite with runners, who are super fast and angry. Then there’s the bloaters who explode from gas decomposition, acting like giant virus-spreading bombs, and sneaky lurkers, who play dead and attack when they sense heat or CO2. Lastly, the screamer variant who use their voices to garner attention from their zombie brethren, much like a siren, a scary scary siren. 

Zombies can live anywhere and again, their existence is driven entirely by food, so anywhere they can find people to eat - they’ll be. In a zombie apocalypse situation, they will just be walking around towns, down alleyways, in people’s houses, in shops - basically anywhere where people can be, they will be too, just in order to feast on them. 

We kind of talked about this already, but in terms of reproduction, they don’t mate - but they do still reproduce through spreading the virus, which is usually fast and catastrophic to the human population. 

However, how about death? Can you kill the undead? Yes, you should know this from our vampire episodes, you silly beans.

The best way to kill a zombie is to take out their brain, this is still functioning, even if only to a basic standard, and without that, they will just be a grimy corpse. So the best bet is anything that can smash a head open, a baseball bat, a shotgun or anything that would pierce the skull and brain. 

However the risk of getting close is a nasty thought, so it’s best to keep your distance too. Sometimes it is thought that you can outlive a zombie, that eventually they would starve to death from lack of human remains or living bodies - however, in some cases, they just wander for eternity from this point onwards, and food isn’t essential for survival but it’s just their MO. 

There is also a theory that if you cover yourself in their gore, you would not be visible to them as a human, but as a zombie and they would ignore you - across the board, this checks out but it is not written within any zombie folklore, so might not save you.

ORIGIN:

Now moving onto etymology, the word Zombie comes from Haitian Creole and the word zombi which is just without the e on the end. That is borrowed from the West African nzambi meaning spirit of the dead.

Their history is probably the most interesting thing about Zombies, and I have to tell you that most of what I have told you so far, is complete FICTION. 

Yes, I have tricked you HAHA. Zombies, within folklore may I stress, are not the mindless, brain-eating monsters from your favourite horror movie, but a very real belief within some Caribbean and African folklore. 

This goes back, most popularly to Haiti in the Caribbean, where zombies were the result of the mystical powers of a bokor, a sorcerer who can raise the dead to serve as personal slaves to them and others. Within the same stories, there are also zombie astrals, which were spiritual fragments of the human soul, which a bokor could trap in bottles to give luck, healing, or success to the user. The two zombie forms represent the Haitian Voudou belief of soul dualism, where the body and spirit both share a person’s essence. 

So they were still slightly mindless, but they didn’t have a compulsion to eat flesh, they were just the mindless undead slaves of warlocks. They didn’t moan or bite, they just did what they were told to do by their master.

However, this belief didn’t start in Haiti, it was brought over by slaves from Central and West Africa and their belief in Baron Samedi, a loa, or god of death, who would collect them for the afterlife unless they had offended him, which is where he would make them an undead slave to him, a zombie. During the plantation practice across North America and the Caribbean, Voudou priests who were usually slaves themselves would convince others of zombies, so that they wouldn’t commit suicide and disrespect their great loa. 

Voudou is very often linked to Zombies because of this, and typically Zombies are considered a Haitian and African monster originally. Voudou is a closed practice, if you want to know more, have a research yourself, but be warned that it is closed to outsiders for a reason, and you must respect the boundaries that their practitioners put up, it’s an important cultural practice.

The first ever official mention of the word Zombie was in 1819, when an English poet wrote about an Afro-Brazilian leader called Zumbi and the etymology around his name, the word nzambi. However, the word zombie didn’t stick around, and was almost lost until the 20th century. 

In the early 20th century though, there was international attention given to Zombies, when the US decided to occupy Haiti in 1915. Because of this, accounts of zombies captured imaginations worldwide, including American explorer William Seabrook’s 1929 book, The Magic Island, which introduced them to Western audiences and inspired the 1932 film White Zombie. This kicked off the obsession with Zombie movies and them as a monster rather than this very different slave being from Haitian folklore. 

Before we get there though, the concept of the living dead was not introduced to us in the 1800s, and we certainly believe that the Voudou culture was practising this long before there was anyone there to note it down, but before that, Zombies were mentioned, just not in name. 

In the epic poem, Gilgamesh, the Mesopotomian goddess Ishtar warns him; 

If you do not open the gate for me to come in,

I shall smash the door and shatter the bolt,

I shall smash the doorpost and overturn the doors,

I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living:

And the dead shall outnumber the living!

Which is a very clear nod towards the animated dead that would eat the living, it just didn’t quite have a name yet - and the poem was written around 2000 years ago, so the belief in man-eating dead man was truly kicking around for a much longer time than movies would leave us to believe. 

Going back to the 1900’s, the Magic Island and White Zombie truly skyrocketed interest in Zombie media. In the 1930’s, American novelist HP Lovecraft, who we’ve covered in our Cthulhu episode, wrote a bunch of stories about zombies. They were mostly mute, violent, primitive and extremely uncontrollable but inspired many other authors after him, which also inspired many, many movies and TV shows. The first true Zombie movie came in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, where the zombies were first given the love for eating human brains and began to move completely away from the Haitian roots, making Zombies and Zombi completely different monsters at this point. 

In the 21st century, we love a zombie movie, TV show or game, with our biggest ones like The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, 28 Days Later, House of the Dead and Resident Evil - just to name a few ones that LITERALLY everyone will know. We as a culture are obsessed with them, although in recent years, Zombie media has fallen slightly back into decline, which it did in the 1980s too, but it does tend to bounce back when someone has a good spin on it. 

What came out of this though, was a fear of zombies and most importantly, a completely new term, a zombie apocalypse, where a virus gets out and the world turns into a zombie hellscape. It was coined entirely for science and horror fiction, yet many of us have had the discussion, even if just for fun, what would you do in a zombie apocalypse? You’ll get to know my answer later, I promise. These plots tend to follow the end-times idea, but usually follow a bunch of survivors who either end up dead, turned or saving us all with a cure.

In this way, Zombies are super unique as a mythical monster - ones that have been created in a small, isolated part of the world, spread through the illegal and immoral extradition of people to another country, used in a religion and then completely adapted and changed to fit into western media. They have literally become their own self-eating beast, consuming their own original monster self to become something even more terrifying to a wider audience. 

Now, let’s talk about real life examples here. What could have possibly inspired zombie myths? We have a few answers, one is Ophio cordyceps uni lateralis, which is otherwise known as the zombie-ant parasite. You may have seen this on Youtube or a nature documentary, where an ant or spider has this mutant growth start out of it and uses its dead body as a shell and controls the animal as it dies to spread the virus. This is what a lot of these big zombie franchises pull inspiration from now, and you can see why - it’s horrifying. 

We also have rabies, a horrendous viral infection which has a 99% death rate if you show symptoms. Caught from diseased animals, this makes the victim hyper-aggressive, unemotional and unreasonable and also makes them stop eating and drinking until their nervous system packs up and dies along with the brain. 

Alongside the real life reasons, we also have real life uses of the word zombie. For instance, if someone is walking and talking monotonously, kind of on autopilot, you might refer to them as a zombie. Or if you’re really tired, you might call yourself one. If you’re attached to your smartphone, there’s even the term Smombie, as you’re so hooked that you become dead to the world outside of your device. 

Zombie is also the title of one of the most famous Irish songs of all time about the horrors of the Troubles between England and Ireland in the ‘90s - if you’ve not heard it, it will change your life and you should have heard it, it’s a super famous song, jeez. But because of this song and the 1976 Zombie album by Fela Kuti, Zombie is also a protest term, symbolising just going along with authority mindlessly. Zombie walks are often organised as protests, but there are also zombie runs where it’s basically tag rugby and people chase you whilst you attempt to do a 5k, so that sounds awful.

We do also have to talk about other mythical comparisons to zombies though, and to be honest - there isn’t anything enough like them. There are the Draugr from Norse mythology, skeleton undead who guard treasure, however, they are just mentioned as undead rather than zombified and they also had magical powers. I covered them in another episode if you’re interested!

Ghouls are often put up there with Zombies too, they are Arabic folklore monsters traditionally who consume human flesh, however, again not quite undead this time and just a demon doing so - that’s just what demons do. 

We do of course, also have Vampires, the kings of the undead history world - but you know enough about them to know that they are undead and drink blood, they’re also kind of sexy whilst zombies almost equate to the very opposite of that - making them slightly similar in a weird, corpse-eating way. If you want more information on Vampires, I covered them in a similar Halloween special a few seasons ago!

QUIZ

Now onto our Halloween special segment, and wouldn’t be a special without a special part in the middle now would it? I’ll read out these questions, and then I’ll post them in polls on Twitter so that I can see your answers! 

Now some of these have not been covered in the podcast, and are general knowledge or modern media questions - so it will be tricky!

Ready? Let’s go!

1. The term 'zombie' comes from which country's folklore?
2. Jamacia
3. Haiti
4. Barbados
5. United States

2. What was the first feature length zombie film?

1. The Earth Dies Screaming
2. Voodoo Island
3. White Zombie
4. The Devil’s Daughter

3. What alcohol would you use to mix a Zombie cocktail?

1. Rum
2. Vodka
3. Midori
4. Creme de Menthe

4. Which 2009 novel combined a classic Regency romance novel with slavering hordes of the undead?

1. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
2. Lady Chatterly’s Zombie
3. Wuthering Zombies
4. Cyrano De Zombie

5. Which band won the "Best Song" award at the 1995 MTV Europe Music Awards with their song "Zombie"??

1. Blue Oyster Cult
2. Green Day
3. Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
4. The Cranberries

6. What term describes a genre of fiction in which civilization collapses due to overwhelming swarms of zombies?

7. Which game released for PlayStation in 1996 is often credited with returning zombies to popular culture?

1. Cold Fear
2. OverBlood
3. Resident Evil
4. Silent Hill

8. Which 2004 British zombie-comedy started the infamous Cornetto trilogy?

1. Lesbian Vampire Killers
2. The Boat That Rocked
3. At World’s End
4. Shaun of the Dead

9. True or false? Kinemortophobia is the fear of zombies.

10. How can you kill a Zombie? 

1. Destroy its brain
2. Set on fire
3. Stab it through the heart
4. Chop its head off

And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed that and I’ll have the questions up on Twitter by the end of the week so you can show off your Zombie knowledge!!

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE: 

Now onto modern media, obviously, we have loads - so buckle in sunshine. I’ve only covered the most popular here, because otherwise, we’d be here forever.

For art, there’s actually nothing here - but this is because they are semi-new creatures within the mythology space, and they’re from the Caribbean, so it was not generally a space for portrait art when these came into folklore either - so we don’t have anything official, but you all know where you can look for zombie art, everyone is doing it!

In movies, we have; Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later Series, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Resident Evil Film Series, Army of the Dead, Evil Dead, Overlord, REC, Warm Bodies, Pet Sematary, Fido, BrainDead, The Cabin in the Woods, Return of the Living Dead, The Crazies, The Crazies, Rampant, Wyrmwood, Night of the Living Dead, White Zombie, Zombi 2, Anna and the Apocalypse, Slither, The Sadness, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, Les Revenants, Tombs of the Blind Dead, Nightmare City, Pro Wrestlers vs. Zombies, Black Sheep, The Dead, The Dead 2: India, Deadstream & Zombie Wars.

For TV, we have; The Walking Dead, Buffyverse, iZombie, Z Nation, Supernatural, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who, Firefly, Being Human US, Being Human UK, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Once Upon a Time, Kamen Rider 555, Kamen Rider Wizard, Kamen Rider Double, Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, Misfits, Dead Like Me, Kingdom, Merlin, Primal, The Amazing Screw-On Head, The Batman, Ben 10, Code Lyoko, Codename: Kids Next Door, Gravedale High, Gravity Falls, The Real Ghostbusters, Spiral Zone, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Teen Titans, Transformers: Prime, Z-O-M-B-I-E-S, Atlantis, Charmed, Dark Hole, Monster Warriors, Search, The Walking Dead, The Aquabats! Super Show!, Torchwood & Breaking Bad.

In video games, we have ones such as; Project Zomboid, Dead Cells, Cookie Run, Fallout 3, Resident Evil, Kirby Super Star Ultra, XCOM 2, Plants vs. Zombies, Epic Battle Fantasy, Cataclysm, Exit Limbo, Minecraft, Fallout: New Vegas Dead Money, Destiny, TimeSplitters, Halo, Dark Souls, Grim Dawn, Dead Space, The Last of Us, Fallout 76, Dark Souls III, Bloody Zombies, Tales of Symphonia, Wario Land, Starcraft, Dead Ahead Zombie Warfare, Demon's Souls, Call of Duty: Zombies, Elden Ring, Nexus War, House of the Dead, Dead Rising, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Metal Gear Solid 4, Prismata, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Skullgirls, Enter the Gungeon, Shantae, Fallout, Diablo, World of Warcraft, SIGNALIS, Dwarf Fortress, Morrowind, Hollow Knight, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, Super Meat Boy, Metroid Prime, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare & Left 4 Dead.

My book recommendation this week is for Zombies: A Cultural History by Roger Luckhurst or Zombies! by Jovanka Vuckovic which are both great depictions and history lessons about Zombies within world mythology and media.

DO I THINK THEY EXISTED? 

Now it’s time for, do I think they existed?

It’s a yes and no for me this week, do I think the dead are capable of reanimating, no. But do I think bodies can move or appear alive, absolutely. And is that my absolute biggest fear - yeppers. 

I don’t think zombies in the traditional sense are real, we’ve never seen anything like that - where humans are reanimated and then choose to eat each other and spread the zombie virus through biting, it’s just all a bit elaborate. However, zombie as an adjective is something we see every day, you might describe yourself as a zombie if you’re super tired or ill or if you have a mindless droning colleague who drains the life out of you. 

I do think Zombies are super cool though, they’re spooky, they’re mindless and at least you know where you stand with them, they just want to eat you - that’s about it. I am personally terrified of zombies. I will tell you a brief story about my life - I wanted to be a pathologist when I was a child, because I wanted to be like Abby in NCIS, yes that is true. However, when I accidentally saw Shaun of the Dead when I was around 10 years old, I realised that if zombies were real, then they would sit up on the mortuary table and I would simply pass away with fear, so that ended my pathology dreams - that and I’m terrified of blood too. 

But that fear has stuck with me ever since, my Dad dragged me to see World War Z back in the 2010’s and I’ve never forgiven him for it, I really do avoid anything with them in and I’m okay with that. The Western Zombie does nothing for me, but I hope it does something for you horror fans, I’m just not with you on this one.

If you’re ever caught in a zombie apocalypse, don’t think this show is going to give you the answers because I don’t know, but I guess I would recommend storing a bunch of food in the attic or basement and waiting it out honestly, and if that’s not an option, the gun is always there for you too and that’s honestly what I would pick in this situation. I’m not advocating suicide, but I would in a zombie apocalypse, yes sir.

But what do you think? Do you think zombies could roam the Earth and how would you prepare for a zombie apocalypse? Let me know on social media!

OUTRO: 

What a perfect Halloween monster, I’ve been looking forward to covering these for a while now, but they only would have worked in a Halloween special - so I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did and got some of those quiz questions spot on.

For our next few episodes, I’ve actually written and recorded in bulk - so you are going to be getting a bunch of episodes released at once for you to enjoy until the point where I feel we’ve caught up on the season, so I hope you’re ready for a  jam packed autumn and winter full of monsters. 

To start off with, we have the one I was meant to cover next, which means we’re heading over to Eastern Europe for a super interesting monster because we’re looking at a human hybrid, which has not happened for a little while. So get ready to bring some silver and garlic for the Dhampir next time!

For now, thank you so much for listening, it’s been an absolute pleasure. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a rating on the service you’re listening on - I’ve got loads of social media for any questions, or suggestions on what monsters to cover next and I’d love to hear from you. The social media handles for Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram are mythmonsterspodcast, twitter is mythmonsterspod and BlueSky is mythmonsters. But all of our content can be found at mythmonsters.co.uk, and you can also find us on Goodpods, Buymeacoffee and Patreon if you want to help me fund the podcast too.

Come join the fun though and share this with your pals, they might love me as much as you do.

But for now, stay spooky and I’ll see you later babes.