Equivalents to zombies in Western narrative

[kestrell]

I've been reading a couple of academic books on the subject of zombies in film and other media, and there is this one statement which academics keep insisting upon which I sense is incorrect, namely, that there is little to no mention of zombies in Western narrative until the zombie films of the 1930s and 1940 brought this exotic concept to American audiences.

While I make no claim to being the Josie Campbell of horror, I seem to have absorbed from my reading the impression that revenants and the fear of the dead being reanimated is a universal fear. I can't recall where I read this specifically--perhaps that scholarly book about burial rituals and vampires which all bookish horror fans seem to have read at some point?--but I seem to recall that, at least through the Anglo-Saxon period, and possibly through the Elizabethan period, a ghost was not a disembodied spirit but the actual animated body of the dead person (as described in
this Wikipedia article on draugr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draugr
and I didn't even know that there is such a person as
The Viking Answer Lady, who can meet all your undead needs
http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/ghosts.shtml

Then there is the Wikipedia entry for revenant

blockquotestart
A revenant is a visible ghost or animated corpse that was believed to return from the grave to terrorize the living.[1] The word "revenant" is derived from the Latin word, revenans, "returning" (see also the related French verb "revenir", meaning "to come back").
blockquoteend

And didn't Greek necromancy involve summoning and enslaving the embodied dead, not just their spirits?

These descriptions seem to indicate that there *was* the equivalent of the zombie in Western narratives, and that the distinction is one of semantics.

What do other fans of the gothic think?

Comments

[rinue]

I've noticed this too. In my opinion, what happened was that we grafted the new word "zombie" onto a very old concept, which was "ghoul" - a graveyard monster that eats human flesh. The Haitian zombie ethnologists started to pay attention to in the 30s doesn't particularly resemble our modern zombie concept; it's a mezmerized/possessed living person who has to do the will of a sorcerer and is not able to control his/her actions. But the word was catchy, so we stole it and pasted it onto a monster we already had. You never hear "ghoul" anymore; it got pushed out by the new word. But it was all over the place in the 1800s.

[kestrell]

*Nod* The nexus of these various distinctions seems to be whether or not the zombie is a resurrected dead person or a mesmerized living person, but then the distinction is blurred further by the fact that both types are often referred to as "the living dead."

[rinue]

Maybe we should make it the deadened live versus the living dead, just for clarity. Then again, as a kid I always had a real problem remembering the difference between yellow-green and green-yellow, because I thought the first color word must be the most important one. Took me forever to get that the first one was an adjective modifying the noun, and therefore the more yellow one was green-yellow.