The zombie movie genre is one of the best-known in horror today, but it wasn’t always about the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ rising to eat the flesh of the living. George Romero created the modern-day zombie in 1968 with his film, Night of the Living ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. In this movie, the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ begin to rise in a cemetery and try to kill the living in a tense black-and-white horror classic.
However, that was a brand-new movie genre that Romero created. The word “zombie” isn’t even used in that movie; instead, they are referred to as ghouls. However, over time, these monsters became known as zombies, which was the name for a completely different horror being from classic cinema. The original zombie was part of voodoo movies.
Before George Romero, I Walked With A Zombie Mastered The Zombie Genre
The Zombies Were Originally Part Of The Voodoo Horror Genre
The zombies seen today gained popularity from the ghouls in Night of the Living ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. However, before that, it wasn’t the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ rising from their graves or infected people turning others into the walking ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. Instead, it was the voodoo cults from locations like Haiti. In these stories, living people are turned into mindless “zombies.”
The way the legend works is that people in Haiti undergo a religious punishment called zombification for committing various crimes. They are drugged and buried alive. Finally, they are exhumed before they die and are enslaved in secret Haitian societies, where they are mostly mindless beings commanded by a Haitian priest.
Several movies explored the concept of Haitian zombies, but the best of these emerged in 1943 from Val Lewton’s RKO Pictures. I Walked with a Zombie follows a young nurse named Betsy, who is hired to care for the wife of a sugar plantation owner on a Caribbean island. Soon, she encounters a zombie sent to retrieve the woman she is responsible for caring for.
I Walked with a Zombie did not receive positive reviews when it was released, thanks to the more prudish atтιтudes of the 1940s. However, retrospective reviews praised its atmosphere, story, and look back at a zombie myth that has been overshadowed by the walking ᴅᴇᴀᴅ of today’s movies and TV shows.
The Val Lewton horror movie, directed by Jacques Tourneur (who also directed Cat People), was influenced by a news article by Inez Wallace, which told real-life stories of voodoo-fixated anthropology and tales of “ᴅᴇᴀᴅ men working in the cane fields.” Lewton turned the article into a film that questioned the accuracy of the stories of these “walking ᴅᴇᴀᴅ” men.
The zombies are mostly pᴀssive and innocent figures.
The two zombies shown in I Walked with a Zombie were Jessica, the plantation owner’s wife, and Carrefour, a cane field worker controlled by the local voodoo priest. However, unlike many zombie movies of the era (such as the 1932 film White Zombie), the zombies are mostly pᴀssive and innocent figures. The people controlling them are the villains.
The Differences Between Zombies Before & After George Romero
The Zombies Before Romero Were Almost Always Innocents
The main difference between movies like I Walked with a Zombie and George Romero’s zombies, other than the fact that Romero’s zombies were the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ risen, is that the pre-Romero zombies were almost always controlled and used as tools or weapons by evil men. The zombies in Romero’s movies are aggressive and intent on killing.
In the pre-Romero movies, the zombies are often portrayed as victims, although in some cases, they were previously bad people before undergoing the zombification ritual. In all the zombie movies, humans are often portrayed as the real villains, but this was more pronounced in the pre-Romero movies because these zombies were not monsters at all.
For these zombies, they are caught between life and death.
I Walked with a Zombie, in particular, shows that the two zombies here are harmless, and it is the humans controlling them who are the true evil. For these zombies, they are caught between life and death (rather than already ᴅᴇᴀᴅ), between science and magic, and torn between logic and emotion.
George Romero was interested in creating chaos, and showed how the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ returning to life to kill the remaining humans would destroy the foundations of society. That is why it is referred to as a “zombie apocalypse.” However, before Romero, it was about stripping people of their humanity, a crime against an individual, making it a very different horror story.
