One of the first books to expose Western culture to the concept of the voodoo zombie was W. Dictionaries trace the word's origin to African languages, relating to words connected to gods, ghosts and souls. The English word 'zombie' was first recorded in 1819 in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey, in the form of 'zombi'. Modern media depictions of the reanimation of the dead often do not involve magic but rather science fictional methods such as carriers, fungi, radiation, mental diseases, vectors, pathogens, parasites, scientific accidents, etc.
The term comes from Haitian folklore, in which a zombie is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magical practices in religions like Vodou. In modern popular culture, zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. A zombie ( Haitian French: zombi, Haitian Creole: zonbi, Kikongo: zumbi) is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse.
