(There are videos at the end.)
By this title, I mean the origins in folklore and superstition, which turned into novels and later movies. And not that zombies were made by vampires in some Young Adult novel.
In European and early Anglo-American archaeology, the word "zombie" is not used -- for it is a Haitian word and introduced into English later. However, they do use the word "vampire." It's literally written on things from that time, like grave head stones. Yikes!
What era am I referring to? Not that long ago. It was still going on as late as the 19th century in some areas.
The vampire of Europe, outside of fiction novels, was the living dead zombie of today. It was dead, buried, and rose from the grave at night. It shuffled around -- it didn't speak -- and it drained people of life, infecting them with it's zombie disease, making them die and rise up from the grave to do the same. For Anglo-America, this is believed to have been TB, or Consumption.
So why isn't the living-dead modern zombie the Caribbean zombie? Well, the folklore is they were raised by a conjurer to be his slaves -- so they were controlled. And they did not spread their zombie disease, making more of them. Only the conjurer could create zombies.
The merger in America is a European undead early "vampire" with a Haitian name. Alas, the zombie entertainment does not use the word "zombie." Mine does, but that's because the characters have seen all the zombie entertainment. Even as recent as The Walking Dead, no usage of the word zombie. That is weird.
Europeans and Haitians are not the only peoples with fear of the dead. It has been universal. But there's variations. A lot of cultures perceived ghosts rather than the physical undead doing the same things, often with a fault of the living and the ghost is casting punishment. Hungry Ghosts of China come to mind. But even in Europe, in Slavic Eastern Europe where the word "vampyre" comes to us (argued to be either Ukraine or Slovakia -- but definitely NOT Romania), they originally believed in a ghost and in a fairly similar way as the Chinese.
Interesting, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead originally had the theme of doing something wrong and the dead come back. The wrong was nuclear weapons and chemicals. Somehow, one of these caused the recently dead to rise up. There was a scene of a strange haze in the air that represented this commentary. That movie continued the folklore, including the tradition of merging different folklore superstitions into a new one. (He went off the rails with the rest of his zombie films thereafter.)
Last factoid, when the witch trial insanity of the Early Modern stopped at the end of the 17th century, a vampire craze started in the 18th. (Vampire in the same undead zombie reference, not a talking guy.) People across Europe opened up graves and desecrated the corpses so much that laws began, starting in Eastern Europe, to stop this.
Four videos below. Enjoy!
American doc ...
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