The flesh eating animated corpses of the dead or recently dead have taken on the name “zombie” in Western culture. The stories actually originated from the Afro-Caribbean spiritualistic religion of Voodoo where people were sometimes reportedly controlled as laborers to a powerful sorcerer. The idea that bodies of the dead can be reanimated, if not exactly brought all the way back to life, is still one of the foundations of Voodoo. However, popular horror fiction loves the ideas of zombies as well. Ever since Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was released in cinemas all over American in 1968, people have been fascinated with the idea of a body that was brought back to life without the higher reasoning skills of the human brain. Older legends and mythology of the Western world depicted flesh eaters as vampires or ghouls who while not necessarily were Einstein knew at least what was going on and tactics to get what they really wanted—flesh. Taking the reanimated corpses of Voodoo and adding these flesh eating attributes really created the zombie archetype of the modern age—a rotting corpse that walks around with a hunger for flesh or more particularly brains. However, the past several decades have seen an explosion in the already steady fan base of zombies. With this explosion are of course different takes on what a zombie actually is and how they act and respond to living humans. Intelligence is always an issue of concern that must be firmly established in anything featuring a zombie as even the stupid corpses can be scary in masses but smart ones are especially horrifying. The zombie intelligence scale really has developed its own range with this popularity explosion that goes from completely feeble minded to something resembling very closely to human level smarts. Either way, if you are faced with a hungry mob of zombies, run to safety before trying to assess their mental capacity. Continue Reading
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