However, if they chose to escape their situation through suicide, they believed in a different fate: an eternity of walking the Hispaniola plantations as an undead slave trapped in a body they no longer controlled, a “ soulless zombie.” So the zombie was born, not as a flesh-eating monster, but as the embodiment of the fear of lifeless misery. These enslaved Haitians saw a light at the end of the tunnel and believed their eventual death would take them back to lan guinée, or Africa, where their afterlife would bring them freedom. “Slavery in Saint-Domingue under the French was extremely brutal: Half of the slaves brought in from Africa were worked to death within a few years, which only led to the capture and import of more.” According to Mike Mariani from the Atlantic, Saint-Domingue was ruled by France and known to import enslaved Africans for sugar plantations. The term “zombie” can be traced back to 17th or 18th century Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue.

So where is that in our thought experiments? While questions of morality and humanity still rise from the flesh-eating monsters, American entertainment has appropriated the zombie, both erasing the history of and lightening the real-world horror of the Haitian concept. The zombie was once a tangible representation of real-world horror - the outcome of misery and fear within Haitian slavery. But at its roots, the zombie used to represent these questions without the modern focus of glorified gore and horror tropes. Modern American zombie stories often hinge on these questions, hitting the points with various levels of effectiveness. Many would agree that, like The Walking Dead, the intrigue of zombie stories rests heavily on their questions of morality and the borders of humanity’s limits.

While The Walking Dead is a great example of a beloved zombie story (At its height, it hit 16.1 million viewers for its season 4 premiere back in 2013), it shares its undead monster with hordes of predecessor stories in a vast array of forms.

After years of gore, tragedy, and hopelessness, “We are the walking dead!” shouts Rick Grimes, finally getting to the point of AMC’s The Walking Dead in its fifth season.

Dead Inside by Lost Zombies