Why are Zombies Popular?

The Walking Dead returns for its fourth season Sunday night, meaning zombies will once again crawl from their graves for our weekly entertainment. However, it’s hard to say that the living dead are returning — from video games such as The Last of Us to Brad Pitt’s summer blockbuster World War Z, zombies have been a fixture in pop culture for years. Despite the numerous groans from those protesting “another zombie movie,” the zombie media invasion shows very few signs of stopping.

But where did this cultural obsession with these rotting flesh-eaters come from?

Unlike vampires — which entered popular consciousness primarily through literary works such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula — zombies lack one singular origin in our modern culture. The living dead have existed in many cultures throughout the world in a variety of forms. One of the oldest surviving works of literature, the Sumerian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, includes a goddess cursing the dead to rise and eat the living. However, there are many differences among these concepts of the undead, and there was no real zombie genre until the 20th century.

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