A Short History of Zombies in Film and Games

The zombie in Zombie Tweet is slow, hungry and a bit confused. That version of the monster is younger than most people think. It took about a century, a handful of low-budget films and one very influential video game to turn a figure from Caribbean folklore into the shuffling crowd everyone recognizes today.

Where the word comes from

The zombie began in Haiti. In Haitian folk belief, a zombi is a dead person brought back by a sorcerer, known as a bokor, and kept as a will-less laborer. Historians connect the idea to the brutal plantation slavery of the colonial period: the worst fate imaginable was to be enslaved even after death. In this older tradition the zombie is a victim, and the person to fear is whoever controls it.

Most Americans first heard the word through William Seabrook's 1929 travel book The Magic Island, a sensational account of Haitian Vodou published during the US occupation of Haiti. It sold well and gave Hollywood a new monster.

The first zombie films

White Zombie (1932), starring Bela Lugosi as a sinister mill owner who controls an army of the walking dead, is generally considered the first feature-length zombie film. Its zombies are silent workers under a spell, faithful to the Haitian version.

Through the 1930s and 1940s the zombie stayed in that mold. I Walked with a Zombie (1943), produced by Val Lewton and directed by Jacques Tourneur, is the best remembered of these films, a moody story set on a Caribbean island. These zombies were eerie, but nobody was afraid of being eaten by one.

Romero changes everything

In 1968, George A. Romero and a small crew shot Night of the Living Dead on a tiny budget outside Pittsburgh. A group of strangers barricade themselves in a farmhouse while the recently dead rise and attack the living. The film never actually calls them zombies; the characters say "ghouls." Audiences and critics called them zombies anyway, and the name stuck.

Romero's version added almost every rule the genre still uses: the dead rise without a sorcerer, they want to eat the living, they move slowly but never stop, and they spread through bites. The real monster in his films is often the group of survivors who can't cooperate. The US Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry in 1999.

He returned with Dawn of the Dead (1978), set in a shopping mall, and Day of the Dead (1985). The mall setting made zombies a joke about consumers wandering the aisles out of habit, an idea that our own escalator-riding zombies borrow from shamelessly.

Brains, music videos and comedy

The habit of zombies groaning for brains comes from The Return of the Living Dead (1985), written and directed by Dan O'Bannon. It was a punk-flavored horror comedy, and its brain-hungry zombies became a cliché almost overnight.

Two years earlier, Michael Jackson's Thriller video (1983) had turned zombies into dancers. Between those two, the zombie became something you could laugh at as well as fear, which is why a game like this one can exist.

Survival horror in games

Video games embraced zombies in the mid-1990s. Capcom's Resident Evil (1996, called Biohazard in Japan) put players in a mansion with limited ammunition, locked doors and slow, relentless zombies. Its success made "survival horror" the standard name for a whole genre. The same year, Sega's arcade shooter The House of the Dead put a light gun in players' hands.

The design ideas from that era still shape survival games, Zombie Tweet included: scarce supplies, hard choices about what to spend, and safe rooms that never feel quite safe enough.

Fast zombies and the 2000s boom

Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002) gave audiences "infected" people who sprinted instead of shambling. Strictly speaking they are not dead, but the film reset expectations. Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead also used fast runners, and the argument between fans of fast and slow zombies has gone on ever since.

The same year, Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004) went the other way. Its zombies are slow, and its heroes are so stuck in their routines that they barely notice the apocalypse at first. It remains the model for zombie comedy.

Books joined in. Max Brooks published The Zombie Survival Guide in 2003 and the novel World War Z in 2006. Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore's comic The Walking Dead started in 2003, and AMC's television version ran from 2010 to 2022, keeping zombies on screens for over a decade.

Zombies go cooperative and casual

Games kept pace. Dead Rising (2006) returned to the shopping mall and filled it with hundreds of zombies at once. Valve's Left 4 Dead (2008) made zombie survival a team sport for four players, built around helping each other through.

Then a tower defense game made zombies friendly for everyone. PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies (2009) has zombies in neckties wandering across a lawn while sunflowers and pea shooters hold them off. It showed that zombies could work in a game for young children without losing their charm.

Naughty Dog's The Last of Us (2013) took the opposite direction, with fungus-infected humans and a serious, emotional story. HBO adapted it as a television series in 2023. By then, zombies had shown up in fitness apps, family films and nearly every game genre there is.

Why zombies stick around

Part of the appeal is that zombies are simple. They have no plan and can't be reasoned with, so every story about them is really about the people who survive. Do they share their food or hoard it? Do they open the door for a stranger? Those are the questions at the heart of Romero's farmhouse and of most zombie games since.

They also bend to any tone. The same monster works in a grim drama, a slapstick comedy and a lawn full of plants. Zombie Tweet sits at the silly end, but every choice in it, from barricading the door to helping the man in the bathrobe, goes back to that 1968 farmhouse.

If you want to test what you have learned, take the zombie challenge and see if you can survive ten days.