Zombie

Films focusing on the figure of the living dead, or, for films drawing inspiration from Caribbean folklore, on individuals reduced to a state of total abulia, victims of a bokor priest's evil spell. In fact, it was Haitian Vodou that first gave rise to the myth of zombies, creatures whose souls have been taken, leaving them without a will of their own.

This folklore was radically reinterpreted by the Western World. By the end of the first half of the 20th century, the term "zombie" was commonly used to refer to individuals with minds dulled by opiates or other CNS depressants, but the word underwent another significant semantic shift following the release of George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968). Highly influenced by Richard Matheson's seminal novel "I Am Legend" (1954), Romero's film in fact inaugurated the apocalyptic version of the walking cadaver, a sort of shambling, slow-moving revenant plunged into an end-of-days scenario, whose single-minded drive and cannibalistic urges became embedded in our collective imagination.

In the literary realm, and particularly on the silver screen, zombies have often been used as a pretext to address socially and politically relevant themes, ranging from anticolonialism ("White Zombie" - 1932) to environmentalism ("Let Sleeping Corpses Lie" - 1974) to consumerism ("Dawn of the Dead" - 1978) to class conflict ("Land of the Dead" - 2005).

In general, any sort of "reanimated cadaver" which doesn't specifically fall within the purview of other Tags will end up being included here.