We’re talking about zombies today, or as they were called in the old world, revenants. These things have been scaring people for centuries, long before the word zombie ever showed up.
The Celtics buried them with stones on top. The Scandinavians did it. The Greeks and Romans did it too. Lots of sites where people were so afraid these revenants would rise up out of the ground that they put heavy stones on the graves to keep them down. The Vikings called them Draugrs, spelled D-R-A-U-G-R. A revenant was a soul that was buried in a bad way and didn’t like it, buried in a shallow grave or with unfinished business.
The word zombie itself is relatively new. Robert Southey picked up the word from the Congo in the 1800s. They called it N-Zombie, started with an N, and he recorded it as zombie without the N. It came from a 1929 travelogue called Magic Island that talked about Haitian voodoo and necromancers. The public just ran with that idea and ate it up. The penny novels and penny dreadfuls loved those spooky stories.
The word didn’t really enter the public lexicon until 1932 when Bela Lugosi made White Zombie. He was a necromancer raising dead people. Originally zombies just rose up as slaves to do the bidding of the wizard. That was what zombies did all the way up until the 1950s when the zombie movie tropes came out and they became the brain-eating monsters we know today.
Speaking of Halloween, about 66% of Americans say they are still going to hand out candy this year despite inflation. The average spending across the entire population works out to about $115 per household. When you could buy a big bag of candy for six or seven dollars to give away to the kids, that didn’t seem like such a bad deal. But now that candy is twenty dollars a bag and it takes three or four bags to get through a Halloween night, well, some of us are just going to sit here and eat the candy ourselves. And we’re going to blame the sunlight being in the wrong angle for confusing us.
Click here to watch this episode of Sketch and Coffee
Also, if you, or a teacher friend, would like a 20-30 minute lesson plan about zombies, feel free to download and share this one:
Leave a Reply