Zombies Influence On American Culture

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Brains. Must have brains. Zombies. Zombies have established a hold on the people of the twenty-first century. There are books, movies, TV shows, and video games about zombies. As people see them today on television shows like The Walking Dead they are mindless, undead, brain eaters. Society sees zombies as a living being infected by a bite, a scratch, or a disease. But what lies behind this braindead form of entertainment? Much of society carry on with their lives and never truly ask themselves how has the zombie came to be what it is today? Zombies have evolved from being an animated corpse raised by magical means, to being seen as a racial gaze, and are now appearing in popular TV shows, video games, and books. Zombies originated in Haiti, …show more content…

The release of the movie White Zombie ended up becoming controversial during its time. The movie included zombies who were controlled by an evil voodoo master and they worked as slaves in Haiti, but people started to notice that this movie was not what it seemed. The zombies, slaves, in the movie, were seen as natives and showed a reflection of colonialist treatment (Lecture). The slaves were secondary citizens who served for the white characters. “There were masters, those with power, and the disenfranchised were powerless labor forces, zombified within the racist gaze” (lecture). This had connected with the African Americans being treated poorly because they were still treated and many worked as slaves back then for their bosses who could be seen as the master that controlled the zombies and was white. Due to the events happening during that time, this movie triggered the racial tension even more and soon even the zombie was seen as a racial gaze. The zombies were able to be taken away from the perspective of being seen as a racial gaze, and that was able to happen during the 1950s civil rights movement. Zombies as the years passed by continued to evolve and are now very much seen in today’s world on popular forms of