Zombie Inspiration: 50 Awesome Artworks

by vitaly on April 22, 2010

in Zombie Inspiration: 50 Awesome Artworks

Zombies have been portrayed using all types of media, from books like H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘In the vault‘ and comic books like the ‘Bombie the Zombie’ in 1949, to movies like the brilliant ‘Evil Dead‘ series, timeless music� videos like ‘Thriller’ and more recently first-person shooter games like, ‘Left 4 dead‘.

It is widely considered that zombies orginated in Haiti. Even now stories are told of local witchdoctorsor or bokor who were controlling people by means of a psycho drugs. Although the earliest documented Zombies were actually found on stone tablets from 1000 BCE describing the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, the tale mentioned the goddess Ishtar who was commanding an army of undead creatures threatened to devour the world with them unless her father gives her the Bull of heaven (the things girls do for a hamburger).

In fact, over thousands of years zombies have been mentioned in history books, from Mary Shelly’s ‘Frankenstein‘ to Ambrose Bierce’s The Death of Halpin Frayser and even in the fantasy trilogy ‘His Dark Materials’ by Philip Pullman. Vampires had already broken away from these tales to become the sexy brooding creatures of the night we know and love, while Zombies were left to stumble through peoples minds as laughable shuffling decaying corpses. For some time it even seemed as if our undead friends might shuffle away into oblivion. Yet then the film maker George A. Romero came along, and became the father of a new breed of Zombie movies. He was heavily inspired by the novel ‘I Am Legend’ (orginally considered to be the first vampire novel). It is said that Romero “bred the zombie with the vampire, and what he got was the hybrid vigour of a ghoulish plague monster”.

He created a film which is now seen by most Zombie fans as the classic genre breaking Zombie movie, his 1968 film ‘Night of the living dead‘ took cinemas by storm. Romero came back again a decade later and put the word Zombie back into Fashion with his 1978 classic ‘Dawn of the Dead’.

Zombie fans now span the globe and from them the Zombie genre has broken the ranks of page and screen and spilled out into fashion, product design and style and it’s this inspiration we will be looking in this showcase.