A lot of what makes Halloween so scary as children is the folklore behind it: the stories that we were told by the campfire, or under a sheet fort in our bedrooms. Ghouls hiding under our beds and ghosts watching us from in the walls. And in our adulthood, the film industry has made them come to life, reigniting in us the fear of the Halloween monsters. 

Brant Thompson, local horror film aficionado and graduate of Western University’s Film Studies program, explained a bit about two of Hollywood’s biggest stars – zombies and vampires.

The origin of Zombiism has its roots dug as deep into the ground as the graves they rose from. 

In Haiti, the act of zombifying a person was to abolish their personal will, and are said to have been created and used as personal slaves. There were two ways to do this:

“[There was] the voodoo aspect of it, where you have the priest casting a spell and turning somebody into their slave. And there was also the more realistic version of hard narcotics. The idea is that there was a drug that would actually make somebody appear dead, and they’d keep them and use them for hard labor,” said Thompson. 

“Hollywood mainly stuck with the voodoo part, they didn’t go with the narcotics because it’s not as glamorized,” he explained. “The first movie was called White Zombie in 1932, and it was about a guy who had somebody as a slave, trying to insulate the woman that he thought was beautiful and wanted to be his own.”

The way zombies were represented in cinema has changed a lot  over the years.

“I was reading a book not that long ago with the trend broken down by decade,” said Thompson.

He relateed the popularity of zombie flicks and their subjects with major world events: “It was definitely being influenced by what was going on in the world.”

In the ‘70s, after George A. Romero’s game-changing release of Night of Living Dead portrayed zombies in control of their bodies, not just as drones, a resurgence of films began. 

“[With] the Vietnam War, people didn’t trust the government because they were putting these newscasts out about what was going on and they started to not believe it. Night of the Living Dead prominently features, throughout the movie, a TV in the farmhouse that they’re holed up in that’s giving these news reports and they don’t really know what’s causing the zombie apocalypse.”

“The ‘80s was the horror craze. There were so many slasher films, so studios were just grabbing any kind of monster that they could make a horror movie out of.” 

“The ‘90s was really interesting. There was such a slow-down. We had Columbine happen, for example, and everybody was trying to figure out why it happened,” Thompson continued. “With zombie films, everybody is shooting everybody else, so the industry backed away from that sort of stuff. People wanted to go to the movies and feel good, they didn’t want to go and see this bleak film.”

But now, zombies are back in full force, and with a vengeance. 

“Zombie and apocalyptic themes are gaining cultural currency today because they speak to the very real fears that are intrinsic to humanity,” said Andrew Stracuzzi, a Popular Culture professor at Fanshawe. “To me, zombies serve one primary function – they amplify and anthropomorphize cultural and social anxiety.”

Thompson recalled that Romero wrote a remake of Night of the Living Dead in 1990 and added a line that exemplified what zombies are. 

“The girl says, ‘They are us and we are them’ and that’s where everybody’s fascination with zombies comes in. They are the closest ‘monster’ to us.” 

“Unlike the myth of a vampire or werewolf or other magical creature – zombies are grounded in our fears of ourselves. In fact, most versions of a zombie depiction attribute their creation to some kind of folly by man – usually a nuclear disaster, a deadly virus, or an accident by one person that causes a contagion to spread. We caused it and are now forced to confront it,” Stracuzzi further explained.

“When [Romero] did his sequel Dawn of the Dead, it was set in a shopping mall, and it was sort of about the idea that we’ve consumed everything else, all our natural resources, everything. Our consumerism used so much that we’re literally consuming ourselves now,” said Thompson.

Cinema (and other media) is often a reaction to the sentiment of the population. Our future is increasingly uncertain, and our generation is recognizing the deep fear of impending disaster. 

Zombie movies are terrifying because they’re an exaggerated version of a world we could be slowly creeping towards.