Life Lessons

Stemming from West African words meaning “fetish” and “a god,” the term zombie was first recorded in English in 1819, according to The Oxford English Dictionary.

While there’s earlier evidence of rising-from-the-dead folklore throughout Haiti and Africa, French poet Pierre Corneille Blessebois introduces the concept to the world with The Zombi of Grand Pérou, a tale about the occult and adultery in the Caribbean.

Zombies are the subject of W. B. Seabrook’s top-selling travel memoir, The Magic Island. “The book is now seen as controversial. It focuses on the Haitian zombie as a man poisoned by a magician and reanimated to be a slave,” says zombie media scholar Brendan Riley, Ph.D., an associate professor of English at Columbia College Chicago.

The horror film White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi, brings the undead to the silver screen. However, notes Matt Mogk, the founder of the Zombie Research Society, “modern audiences may not like it, because no one’s eating anyone.” (One big fan: musician and director Rob Zombie, who names his 90s metal band after the movie.)

Director George Romero releases Night of the Living Dead, the original in a series of cult classics, where viewers first witness fiends devouring human flesh. “The movie hit during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, when people were experiencing fear of neighbor and country. It set the tone for zombie movies going forward,” says Riley.

Close to midnight, in a graveyard with dozens of dancing dead, Michael Jackson makes music-video history with Thriller. These days, thousands from Scotland to Singapore re-create the Thriller dance every October.

Corpses continue to enthrall audiences with hits like 28 Days Later… and Resident Evil. Why? There are many theories, including how media screens “zombify” us, but Riley says the shaky state of the world has a lot to do with it. “As a result of domestic and international terrorist attacks, there’s a worry that the people around us will become enemies.”

TV joins the craze with the AMC show The Walking Dead. (Almost 16 million tuned in for the season-five finale last March.)

Zombies overtake nearly everything. Tony Horton of P90X promises to fight “zombesity” with The Walking DeadWorkout. The app Zombies, Run! allows you to experience an apocalyptic escape. You can hone your crossbow skills at Zombie Survival Camp in central New Jersey. And up next: a 2016 film based on the 2009 novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. (Jane Austen must be rolling over in her grave.)

Over the following decades, the zombie genre lags in popularity. “B-pictures,” like Voodoo Island and The Thing That Couldn’t Die, barely keep it alive.

In 2011 the website for the Centers for Disease Control publishes the tongue-incheek Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.

Written by N.Jamiyla Chisholm

Photograph by Martin Parr

SEXY PINEAPPLE. Sexy Mr. Peanut. Sexy Day of the Dead ghoul. For the woman who finds cats and bunnies to be just a little too on-the-fur-covered nose, there are plenty of alternative options for seductive Halloween costumes. Well, almost endless. I call dibs on the Sexy Peacock. And not for the first time, either. This Halloween marks the 10th anniversary of my dressing up as an iridescently plumed, ill-tempered male bird. You heard me. Ten.

It started, as many things do, from a place of lazy desperation. I had just moved apartments in New York when Halloween came, and I didn’t know which clothing was in which box. I had never bought into the need for a “sexy” costume before, generally preferring to duct-tape plastic animals to a sweatshirt, paint my face in stripes and dub myself a “zoo.” But that evening I could locate only one box of clothing (note to self: label things), and in that box was a long, shimmery blue skirt and a short purple bridesmaid’s dress. I purchased feathers at a party-supply store around the corner, rimmed my eyes in colored pencil, and presto: peacock. Not too shabby.

When I arrived at a party that year, my friends were dressed with similar degrees of effort. A perfunctory professor. A weak witch. A slightly sloppy surfer. We were all in our mid-20s, a time when costuming efforts are tempered in favor of drinking efforts. You’re a bit too old to spend weeks prepping yourself for Halloween and a bit too young to be staying up all night, glue-gunning rhinestones onto a toddler’s wings.

“You look like a hooker from Deadwood,” my friend, the half-assed hippo, diagnosed me.

Sloane Crosley is the author of the essay collections I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number. Her first novel, The Clasp, is out from FSG books this month.

Reader, I was OK with it. For an adult, Halloween can be rough on the fairer sex. There are two streams of costume pressure: attractive and ironic. And barring dressing as a Sexy Ghostbuster, it can be challenging to cross the streams. For me, the peacock hit the right note between alluring and ridiculous. It’s classic but not common, qualifying as sexy without having to resort to ears. So each year my costume would grow in complexity, the way one collects ornaments for a Christmas tree. At this very moment, the top shelf of my closet is host to an array of peafowl accouterments: a pair of green satin ballroom gloves, a belt covered in feathers, and a fascinator piled high with purple tulle. There’s even a pointy black beak with an elastic strap.

But recently I have begun to notice the intangible price I pay for my perpetual peacock. This started about four years ago, when I was walking home alone and my fake bird lashes began to irritate me. I stopped to examine my eye in the reflective surface of a drugstore window. My sister and her fiancé happened to be coming down the street at the exact moment I was leaning into my reflection, dressed as a giant purple-and-green bird.

“Look at this weirdo,” my sister said, nudging my future brother-in-law.

What should have been nothing more than a funny coincidence had me genuinely embarrassed. I began to question the very nature of the peacock, wondering if the bird isn’t an increasingly pronounced symbol of the life I’m not living. The perfunctory professor and the weak witch? They are married, living several states away, and have just given birth to their third child. The slightly sloppy surfer cleaned up her act, got a business-school degree, and just bought a house outside London. And me? I am still dressing in the same costume as I did when I was 26. That tulle headdress has grown awfully tight, little emblem of inertia that it is.

I get the sense that, to my friends, the disconnect between our lives is one of stability vs. glamour. They change diapers; I rotate feathers. I almost missed last Halloween because I was in France, doing research for my first novel, The Clasp. It’s a comedic love triangle that morphs into a caper about a missing French necklace. The characters find themselves in Normandy for the second half of the story so. For research, I spent weeks living in an actual chateau. Granted, the shower only ran cold and the mattress felt made of oak, but still…not too shabby. The Halloween before that, I attended a party with my boyfriend, and we stayed out all night because there were no babysitters to be relieved.