Zombie Movie Genre Question

[TikiSoo]

Someone recently asked what was the first Zombie movie made? I thought White Zombie with Bela Lugosi from the 30's was the earliest I remembered seeing.

 

This week I went to a local "Zombiegeddon" screening of three great zombie movies spanning from '72 to 2012.

I noticed these zombies are now dead people craving human flesh, attacking, killing & eating their victims.

This is a far cry from the Voodoo idea of zombies being benign drones raised from the dead to silently do a master's bidding in earlier films.

 

Discussing this concept with a fellow Cinefile, we wondered when this shift of definition came about? His guess was Night Of The Living Dead in '69 was the first "flesh eating" zombie movie.

 

Any authorities on the genre out there to confirm this?

[drm456]

Night of the Living Dead was the first of the flesh eating zombie movies. Actually they were supposed to be ghouls but nowhere in the film were they called this and everybody started calling them zombies. Of such is movie history made

 

The first zombie movie made I believe was I Walked With A Zombie. White Zombie with Bela Lugosi came later. Of course this is Hollywood movies. Whether or not there was a zombie movie made elsewhere before that I don't know.

[joefilmone]

You are right- the original concept of the zombie was more like a walking dead slave like in "White Zombie" in Romero's version they do act like ghouls which are creatures that feed off dead bodies.

[Martan]

Actually, I think 'White Zombie' was made in 1933, while ' I Walked with a Zombie was made in 1943.

[Swithin]

May I recommend two books that feature zombies? The first is *The Magic Island*, by W.B. Seabrook. This 1929 book (written a few years before the film White Zombie was released) more or less introduced the concept to the U.S. It's fascinating and very sensationalized -- just read the Wikipedia bio of its author:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Seabrook

 

The second, a scholarly book, is *Voodoo in Haiti*, by Alfred Metraux. I studied religion in college; Voodoo in Haiti was one of the most interesting books I read, by a noted French anthropologist.