Zombie Costumes
Zombie Halloween Costumes

In America, the legends of zombies rose from the ashes of Haitian and New Orleans voodoo. It refers to a human corpse mysteriously reanimated to serve the undead and feed mercilessly on the living.

In 1968, George Romero released his low-budget film, Night of the Living Dead. It reinvented not only the idea of zombies, but the entire horror genre. It produced a whole new type of terror and transformed the way in which people were scared by movies and monsters. In Night of the Living Dead, cadavers in various states of decay are resurrected by a nuclear spill and driven by a desire to eat human flesh.

There have been a variety of zombie movies before and after Night of the Living Dead, each depicting a different cause for the dead corpses returning to life; virus outbreaks, infectious diseases or sorcery. However, even though there are different types of zombies, one thing still remains the same…the way the hero in the movie kills it. It’s a hard and fast rule with zombies; the only way to kill them is to destroy their brain…shoot them in the head, bash it in with a hammer, baseball bat, club or tire iron; whatever the good guy or girl in the movie has on hand.

Today, in many cities zombies even have their own unofficial holiday. It’s an annual tradition to break out your bloody zombie suit and join, the Zombie Walk. Some cities call it, Walk of the Dead, Zombie Parade, Red, White and Dead party or a Zombie Crawl. No matter what it’s called there’s a ton of zombies that come out for it. The first Zombie Walk on record was in August 2001, in Sacramento, California. The first world record Zombie Walk was in October 2006, outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with 894 zombies walking the streets. But it just keeps getting bigger and bigger! The most current world record for the Walk of the Dead was October 2010 in New Jersey with 4093 zombies in attendance!