Zombie Manifestations

The conception of zombies that we have watched and read in class this past week have all been portrayed in slightly different ways, yet all maintain the same general idea of what a zombie is—an undead corpse. This is interesting because it shows how zombies are not necessarily all defined by uniform characteristics and manifestations, but rather are defined by the writer’s own experiences and interpretations. For example, zombies in “Danger Word” were seen as incredibly uncanny, whereas in Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” the zombies were not so much uncanny as they were explicitly dead and haunting. In contrast, the Haitian origin of zombies were used to express enslavement and resistance to enslavement because the zombies were puppet-like in order to represent the lack of human will.