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Zombie: in Haitian folklore a zombie (Haitian French: zombi; Haitian Creole: zonbi or poss. Central African Kikongo: zumbi) is an animated corpse raised by magical means, eg witchcraft (OED).
The fascination with movies about zombie invasions of small, sleepy villages (thank you Night of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead, 💀 etc. etc.)—which shows no signs of abating—has helped to perpetuate the “zombie apocalypse”§ trope and its many and diverse applications, including the (very) odd non sequitur question on standard office job applications perversely thrown in to mess with the applicants’ minds (“What would you do if there was a zombie apocalypse?”).
The interest in and marketability of zombie culture is so pervasive, nothing is sacred…eventually it has even infiltrated the high ground of classical English literature, so we get for instance, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Jane Austen’s characters contra the zombie nation. Result: a mash-up parody with dagger thrusting social commentary. A real WTF moment for Jane Austen if she just happened to be resurrected in the early 21st century aged 225…to discover that Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy have traded in their genteel Regency manners for a licence to liquidate zombies on every second page of a version of the Jane Austen classic text nightmarishly re-imagined. Apparently Liz got out of her west country drawing-room and conversations with respectable gentry-men and women and sanctimonious parsons long enough to hone up her martial arts skills to black belt standard.
The great success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies ensured a follow-up. Quicker than you can intone the words “pseudo-Haitian black magic”, we got the miraculous materialisation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, a prequel with familiar overtones of the original theme, in which all the Bennet sisters get some in-depth training in the noble art of zombie-killing (tuition bulk discount?) and then put it to good practice by setting about the task of saving the good denizens of spacious landed estates in the south of England from a fate equal to zombilification!
But why stop at Citizen Zombie and Pride and Prejudice? Apparently there were other monsters eyeing off other, equally famous texts of Jane Austen in this new twist in literary genres. Vampires, werewolves, man-eaters extraordinaire, plenty to choose from. In next to no time Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters—the follow-up book project Miss Austen never got round to writing—rolled off the presses and on to the shelves…a rom-com of a sort fashioned with “tentacled mayhem”. Will Sense and Sensibility’s heroines, the valiant Dashwood Sisters, run the gauntlet of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, double-headed sea serpents and other biological monstrosities long enough to find true love? (www.goodreads.com)
§ Zombie apocalypse is a subgenre of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction in which society collapses due to overwhelming swarms of zombies (“zombies are formicating all over the back paddock like…well, zombies!)
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