October 24, 2023 – THEME WEEK DAY 2

We’re continuing our theme week on Monsters today with Zombies!
The fear of the undead goes all the way back to Ancient Greece. Archeologists have found many graves with skeletons held down by rocks and other heavy objects to prevent the dead from reanimating. The term Zombie comes from Haitian folklore. There, a zombie is a dead body reanimated through various methods, usually magical practices in religions like Voodoo. Haitian zombies weren’t the biting, brain-eating zombies we know today. Instead, they were said to be brought back from the dead as mindless servants to do the bidding of their zombie keeper. Zombie folklore has been in Haiti for centuries and possibly originated in the 17th century when West African slaves were brought there to work on sugar plantations. Some scholars believe the life of a zombie represented the plight of slavery.
Zombies were eventually brought to Western cultures with the first zombie fiction book in 1927, called The Magic Island. The book was turned into the first feature-length zombie movie in 1932, White Zombie. Zombies as we know them today are thanks to George A. Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead. Its sequel, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, was the most commercially successful zombie movie at the time. Today, the highest grossing zombie move of all time is World War Z, which made more than $540 million when it was released in 2013.
Researchers have used theoretical zombie infections to test epidemiology models. In 2017, students from the University of Leicester Department of Physics and Astronomy used a model to plot the spread of a zombie infection, and found that on the 100th day of the epidemic, only 273 survivors would remain.
Cabletv.com recently put together a list of the best and worst states to survive a zombie apocalypse. They looked at things like population density, farms per capita, and the amount of electricity from solar. The top 5 states to survive a zombie apocalypse are: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Nevada. The worst? New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and Maryland. Learn more here.