Whilst looking for the oldest zombie movie I could find at I Heart Video, I came across White Zombie. Had Bella Lugosi in it, so it seemed old enough.
When I watched it, I realized that our ideas about zombies have changed a lot since the 1930s. This movie, which took place in Haiti, was indeed about reanimated people, but their reanimation involved being given a voodoo drug that caused them to fall into a deep sleep at which point they were proclaimed dead. The poor creature was then “resurrected” to forever serve their master, the person who had given them the drug in the first place. In addition to sending the recipient into a deep coma, the drug also caused a loss of soul once they were awakened.
This prompted me to tap Wikipedia to learn the origins of the term Zombie. Now, it is Wikipedia, so take this with a grain of salt. According to Wiki, the term zombie originally comes from Voodoo folklore and is defined as a “human body re-animated by supernatural means and shamanistic medicine to create dread among the living.”
A bokor (a dark voodoo priest) or a mambo (a female voodoo High Priest) can reanimate a corpse and will retain control of the zombie, as zombies have no will or soul to act independently. Now, there is some belief that the priests don’t actually resurrect the dead, but give living people drugs that cause them to seem dead. The priest can then miraculously raise the dead person from their grave to do their bidding.
[Answers.com even has a recipe for creating your own zombie to do your bidding! (second entry)]
Wikipedia then goes on to claim that our current vision of zombies came from I Am Legend, a book by Richard Matheson. Now, the creatures described in this book are more like vampires, what with their taste for blood and distaste for all things sunshine related, so I don’t know what they’re talking about. But it is Wikipedia, after all. The movie The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, is a loose adaptation of I Am Legend as is Omega Man with Charlton Heston.
Afterword: Well, Holy Crap! I did a google search for I Am Legend, and yet another movie adaptation of this book is being created as we speak. It’s due out in 2007 and will star Will Smith.