A zombie Haitian French : zombi ; Haitian Creole : zonbi ; Kikongo : zumbi is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse.
In modern popular culture, zombies appear in horror genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore , in which a zombie is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magical practices in religions like Vodou. Modern media depictions of the reanimation of the dead often do not involve magic but rather science fictional methods such as fungi , radiation , gases , diseases , plants , bacteria , viruses , etc. Zombies are real-life individuals in Haiti who have undergone a religious punishment called zombification for committing crimes such as rape or land theft.
They are drugged, buried alive, exhumed and then enslaved by secret societies in Haiti. This practice became the basis for the zombie myth of a resurrected corpse.
The English word "zombie" was first recorded in in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey , in the form of "zombi". One of the first books to expose Western culture to the concept of the voodoo zombie was W. Seabrook 's The Magic Island , the account of a narrator who encounters voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls.
A new version of the zombie, distinct from that described in Haitian folklore, emerged in popular culture during the latter half of the 20th century.
