Zombies, Real or Fake?

Cristian Cruz

12/7/10

Period-4 English

Have you ever wondered if zombies can exist? or if a zombie apocalypse can ever happen? The definition for apocalypse is, a prophesy or revelation, especially about the end of the world.The purpose of this paper is to explain how zombies have evolved in movies over the years, and if zombies are real or fake.The questions i will be answering in this paper are, Has a zombie ever been spotted?, Where did the idea of zombie movies come from?, How have zombies evolved in movies?

The first question I will be answering is Has a zombie ever been spotted? Zombies were first talked about in 1937. This is the story that I found in wikipedia,” Felicia Felix-Mentor reportedly died in 1907, after a sudden illness of the type that Haitian belief finds to be characteristic of a person marked to be made into a zombie. In 1936 a woman (either nude or in ragged clothing depending on the source) was found wandering the streets, and made her way to a farm which she claimed belonged to her father. The owners identified the woman as Felicia Felix-Mentor, long thought dead, and Felix-Mentor's husband also confirmed this. Due to her poor health, she was sent to a government hospital. A doctor who interviewed her described her behavior: Her occasional outbursts of laughter were devoid of emotion, and very frequently she spoke of herself in either the first or the third person without any sense of discrimination. She had lost all sense of time and was quite indifferent to the world of things around her.” Zombies were first described as slow moving creatures, and were also portrayed as that in movies. Now they are seen in movies as fast creatures that are also part human and have been infected with a disease. In my opinion I think that zombies where changed to scare people.

The second question i will be answering is where did the idea of zombies come from? The idea of zombies came from Haiti, the idea of zombies came from a religion called “voodoo”. Many voodoo people believed that if they died and woke up they were officialy a zombie. So since many voodoo people belived that shamans would go around and give them poison and the people not knowing it was poison would drink it. A shaman is, “A person who acts as intermediary between the natural and supernatural worlds, using magic to cure illness, foretell the future, control spiritual forces,”Shamans would make the poison from puffer fish , it would make the people really cold and paralyzed and made them look dead. A few days later the poisoned person would wake up and believe he or she was a zombie. In conclusion, The person would  do what the shaman told them to.

The third question i will be answering is how have zombies evolved in movies? After hearing about the sightings in Haiti a movie director George A. Romero decided to make a movie. That movie was the one that exagerated the zombies into being evil creatures that eat human beings. The original idea of a zombie was that they walked very slow, ate brains only, and it was very easy to escape from them in movies. Nowadays the zombies are portrayed as very fast running infected people that rip humans into peaces and don’t really eat anything. zombies may indeed one time exist.  In conclusion zombies have been very exagerated from the original idea.

Through this research i have learned the meaning of zombies.The purpose of this paper was to explain if zombies are real or fake .Hope this helped understand thank you for reading.