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A zombie is a kind of undead, or figuratively, a very apathetic person.

1 Zombies in Vodun

According to the tenets of Vodun (voodoo), a dead person can be revived by a houngan or mambo. After resurrection, it has no will of its own, but remains under the control of the person who performed the ritual. Such resurrected dead are "zombies".

A more skeptical take is that a zombie is a living person who has never died, but is under the influence of powerful drugs. Wade Davis , an American botanist, was the main person to present a pharmacological case for zombies in two books - The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988). Davis travelled to Haiti in 1982 and as a result of his investigations claimed that zombies could be made by the ingestion of two special powders. The first, coupe poudre, induced a 'death-like' state, the key ingredient of which was the pufferfish (Tetraodontiformes) toxin tetrodotoxin (TTX). The second powder of dissociative hallucinogens held the person in a will-less zombie state. There was considerable skepticism to Davis's claims; he was widely accused of fraud and there has been no final statement as to the veracity of his findings.

Others claim zombies are sufferers of various psychiatric disorders such as catatonic schizophrenia whose symptoms are misinterpreted as a return from the dead.

2 Zombies in fiction

Zombies are regularly encountered in horror- and fantasy-themed fiction, films, video games and role-playing games. They are typically depicted as mindless, shambling, decaying corpses with a hunger for human flesh, most famously in Night of the Living Deadzombie and her victim Night of the Living Dead ( 1968) is a seminal horror film directed by George A. Romero which was to transfigure the horror-movie genre. The plot is simple and familiar to viewers even casually acquainted with the genre: the dead come. However, some films (such as 28 Days Later28 Days Later is a 2002 post-apocalyptic science fiction movie directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland. 28 Days Later is set in England at the beginning of the 21st century. Style and inspiration The film is Boyle's re-interpretation of the ") feature living but otherwise zombie-like humans, usually as the result of diseaseA disease is any abnormal condition of the body or mind that causes discomfort, dysfunction, or distress to the person affected or those in contact with the person. Sometimes the term is used broadly to include injuries, disabilities, syndromes, symptoms,.

In fiction zombies can generally be disabled by either dismemberment or the destruction of the brain. In a few cases the entire body of the zombie must be destroyed as individual limbs or even fingers continue to move after being severed from the body.

The Resident EvilResident Evil (known as BioHazard in Japan), developed by Capcom, is the name of a successful franchise of horror-adventure video games that is credited with popularizing the " survival horror" game genre, in which the goal is to avoid being killed by mon series of video gamescreenshot of Tetris for the Nintendo Game BoyA video game is a game played using an electronic device with a visual display. Overview Often "video game" is taken in a narrow sense to mean those games played on consoles for television and similar handhelds makes particular use of zombies.

Other causes of zombies in fiction include radiationRadiation generally means the transmission of objects or information from a source into a surrounding medium or destination. Within physics, related concepts are: Ionizing radiation is a stream of particles (photons or other particles) with sufficient ene acting on the brains of the dead, evil magic or Vodun, extraterrestrials, the use of drugs or the substitution of the brain for some sinister artifact.



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