![]() ![]() (Image credit: Sarah Cheriton-Jones (opens in new tab) shutterstock (opens in new tab)) But like zombies and vampires, shape-shifting human-wolf hybrids have quite a long history in the folklore of many nations. Remus Lupin in the "Harry Potter" movies, Jacob Black in the "Twilight" series, Scott Howard in "Teen Wolf" - these are just a few of the best known werewolves from books and movies. Why the undead feel such an insatiable hunger for human body parts is really anyone's guess. Romero's film "Night of the Living Dead." In 1985, on-screen zombies added human brains to their ghastly menu in the movie "Return of the Living Dead" (despite its similar name, "Return of the Living Dead" was not also directed by Romero). Films portraying reanimated corpses that feast on human flesh first started popping up in the 1960s with George A. īut the modern concept of a zombie in Western cultures has diverted significantly from its Haitian roots. Zombies could never reach lan guinée (which literally means Guinea, or West Africa, the final resting place), according to Wilentz. Slaves who considered committing suicide to escape their miserable lives were constantly reminded by their overseers (usually other slaves who were sometimes also Voodoo priests) that, if they killed themselves, they might become zombies, or walking dead with no souls who are bound to do the bidding of a mortal master. In certain traditional African religions, people believe that a human soul can be stolen from the body and be bottled up for later use, but this idea took a much different form when it reached Haiti. In a piece she wrote in 2012 for The New York Times, Wilentz described how modern ideas about zombies arose from the blending of old African religious beliefs and "the pain of slavery" that defined Haiti before it gained independence from France at the turn of the 19th century. The zombies in the 1968 film "Night of the Living Dead" had a taste for flesh, but had not yet broadened their horizons to braaaiins. Zombies are what Amy Wilentz, an English professor at the University of California, Irvine, called a "New World phenomenon." People likely buried suspected vampires this way to keep them from emerging from the grave as revenants that could harm the living.įans of the hit TV show "The Walking Dead" may be interested to know that their favorite flesh-eating characters are based on some very real history - that of Haiti in the 17th and 18th centuries. dates back to the 1830s, according to Smithsonian Magazine. But people continued to bury suspected vampires this way into the 18th century in Poland, and a vampire grave discovered in Connecticut in the U.S. These strange graves, which sometimes also feature decapitated skeletons or skulls with bricks shoved between the jaws, may have originated in the Middle Ages, as early as the 11th century, when tales about vampires started to emerge in Europe, Betsinger said. Ancient Babylonians and Greeks may also have believed in these reanimated corpses, Tracy Betsinger, a bioarchaeologist at the State University of New York at Oneonta who has studied "vampire graves," told Live Science in 2014.Īrchaeologists have found evidence of so-called vampire burials - in which the body of the deceased is pinned to the earth with wooden stakes or iron bars - in countries such as Poland, Bulgaria and the United States. And some historians date vampires all the way back to the time of the ancient Egyptians, whose myths include references to demons summoned from other worlds. In China, there are jiangshi, evil spirits that attack people and drain their life energy. Many other regions and cultures share similarly creepy stories about vampirelike creatures.
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