Editorials
Evolution of the Undead: A Brief History of Zombies in Horror
Of all the movie monsters, the zombie is the most deceivingly simple. Zombies are reanimated corpses, hollow, decayed husks of their former selves driven by primal instinct. Yet, zombies almost always tend to serve as reflections of current fears, making their evolution in film one of the most interesting. In other words, zombie movies are never even really about zombies. From voodoo to viral outbreaks, from rigor mortis crawls to rage-induced sprints, the zombie has grown from B-movie status to mainstream pop-culture phenomena over the decades.
Long before they made their debut on celluloid, the zombie terrorized through Haitian folklore and storytelling. The word “zombie” is said to have come from “nzambi,” which in West Africa translates to “spirit of a dead person,” or “zonbi,” a Haitian Creole word that refers to a dead person that’s been reanimated by magical means. Haitian folklore usually featured Bokors as the necromancers of the dead. These practitioners of the dark arts would resurrect the deceased, though they’d have no free will or speech. They were slaves to the master who raised them. So, it’s not surprising that the first zombies on film followed this tradition in 1932’s White Zombie.
Based on William Seabrook’s novel The Magic Island, White Zombie stars Bela Lugosi as Murder Legendre, an evil voodoo master with a horde of zombie slaves that operate his sugar cane mill. A wealthy plantation owner seeks Murder’s help in luring a woman away from her fiancé, but Murder instead turns the woman into another one of his zombie slaves. 1943’s I Walked with a Zombie follows a nurse hired to care for a Caribbean plantation owner’s ailing wife, and runs afoul of voodoo and zombies. 1941’s King of the Zombies saw a trio of wayward travelers wind up at an island mansion for refuge, and find their host is not only working with spies but a voodoo master of zombies. In Revenge of the Zombies, a Nazi inhabiting an old Louisiana swamp mansion raises zombies to amass an undead army for the Third Reich. The shared themes and similar plot setups among the zombie films of the ‘30s and ‘40s heavily revolve around race and fears of oppression.
By the ‘50s, horror had shifted into its atomic age, the threat of the atom bomb and nuclear war playing a significant role in the fears of the decade. Threats from beyond the boundaries of Earth also played a significant factor. This reflected in the zombie trope. Genre filmmakers retooled what a zombie could be, and moved away from voodoo. Teenage Zombies featured a mad scientist that turns teens into her slaves through nerve gas. A former Nazi controlled an atomic-powered zombie to help a gangster return to power in Creature with the Atom Brain. Aliens resurrected the dead to destroy the living in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. Aliens flat-out inhabited the bodies of the dead to attack the living in Invisible Invaders.
Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend centered around a sole survivor of a pandemic that wiped out most of the human population and turned everyone else into blood-sucking vampires. The book inspired multiple adaptations, but more importantly, it was one of the apocalyptic movies that inspired the filmmaker who would change how we viewed zombies forever; George A. Romero. His seminal Night of the Living Dead never even uttered the word “zombie,” but created a blueprint that would be copied for decades. His film established that the living dead would devour the flesh of the living, that they could only be destroyed by damage to their brains, and that they could spread their undead status with a bite. Despite the gory nature of these ghouls, they were a faceless foe that revealed that the living were their own worst enemy. The casting of Duane Jones as Ben, the hero that meets a tragic fate at the end of the film for being mistaken as a ghoul, takes on a more socially charged context given the political climate at the time of release.
The blank slate of the zombie outbreak continued in Romero inspired films like Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue), which aimed at counter-culture fears, and Deathdream (Dead of Night) explored Vietnam war anxieties through a fallen soldier’s return from the grave. Romero’s follow up, Dawn of the Dead, aimed its bite at consumerism with its central protagonists barricaded in a mall. Dawn was Romero’s first to actually use the word “zombie” in relation to its flesh-eating corpses.
The golden age of practical effects in the ‘80s meant that zombies as metaphor took a backseat, letting the gore and creature effects take center stage. Lucio Fulci upped the ante on zombie gore with his zombie-centric films. The basic rules of Romero’s Living Dead were mostly adhered to but tinkered with enough to offer up exciting takes on the subgenre. The Return of the Living Dead showed off the dead’s playful side with punk rock attitude. Re-Animator gave H.P. Lovecraft’s work a gory sense of humor with teeth. Dead & Buried reintroduced voodoo to the subgenre. Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow eschewed the ‘80s practical effects-driven aesthetic to take the zombie film back to its Haitian roots. Mostly, though, the decade was defined by intricate and unique designs for its brain-hungry undead, with buckets of blood and guts spilled. Peter Jackson’s early ’90s Dead Alive (Braindead) set the gold standard in zom-com gore, though the decade was zombie-lite for the most part.
It was in the 21st century, though, that the subgenre splintered into various branches of exploration of what a zombie could be. Viral outbreak films like 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, and the Dawn of the Dead remake exploited fears of contagion while making the infected zombies faster and stronger than ever before. Zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Fido used zombies as a mere backdrop and catalyst for the personal growth of its human characters. More recently, Train to Busan and One Cut of the Dead used the zombie formula as a foundation to craft heartwarming (and tear-jerking) tales of family bonds tested.
Every time the zombie subgenre falls into an overly repetitive pattern and looks to wane in popularity, a new take brings about a resurgence. Look at The Walking Dead series, for example. Its extreme success didn’t just make zombies trendy again but gave the zombie story mainstream appeal. Even in its latter seasons with viewership at an all-time low, it still pulls in 4.5 million viewers. It also helped pave the way for gore on TV, at least in terms of making it more acceptable.
More than any other movie monster, the zombie has proven adept at evolving; the mindless nature of the living dead makes for a perfect blank canvas. Even without the potential applications of socially-driven horror, we humans tend to fear death and what could be waiting for us beyond. There’s something inherently terrifying about a flesh-eating, rotting corpse, and the apocalyptic nature surrounding it; the not-so underlying message that you can’t escape death is crystal clear.
No matter the ebbs and flows of horror trends, zombies never stay dead for long.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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