Zombies are horror perfection: They kill without remorse, they never tire out, and there’s no reasoning with them. They’ve been around so long, and have gnawed so deep into our cultural fabric, that it’s easy to forget from whence they came. Thankfully, YouTube’s Nerdwriter1 is here to lay out the monster’s roots in Haitian voodoo, as well as its earliest appearances in movies like 1932's White Zombie.
Everything changed in 1968 with George Romero’s Night of The Living Dead, which has emerged as the foundation for all zombie movies made since. It was when creators stopped relying on the racist “master/slave” dynamic and began creating monsters that had their own instinctual free will to kill and eat brains all on their own that when zombies took on the horror context they have today. The zombie’s become it’s own kind of modern myth, so firmly rooted in our own culture (and AMC’s programming) that it’s safe to say they’re not going anywhere. Besides, with anti-vaxxers harboring more and more diseases, we’ll probably have our own zombie apocalypse any day now.