The origins of zombies lie with voodoo, a religion that originated in Haiti and eventually spread to New Orleans with Haitian immigration. Voodoo sorcerers are said to be in touch with ancient spirits and gods which gives them the ability to practice black magic.

They work their magic by using various powders. One such use for this power is the creation of zombies. A voodoo zombie is a person whose will, awareness, and memory have been stolen by a sorcerer. Once a person is put under a sorcerer's (boko) spell, they enter a trance that makes them appear dead and are then buried.

After the burial, the boko steals the body and works his magic upon it, bringing it back to life and using it as his slave. A boko can also steal the spirit of a person who dies under natural causes if he acts quickly enough and turn them into his slave as well.

Some natives put heavy sacred stones on the tops of graves to prevent a boko from getting the zombie to rise from its grave. People in Haiti today still believe strongly in zombies and live in fear of possible bokos.

Haiti zombies are nothing more than slaves for their master and have no taste for human flesh or brains. Voodoo zombies can be dispatched by destroying any controlling objects such as a boko's voodoo doll or by the appropriate ceremony.

Another tactic is to get the zombie to consume salt or meat, which awakens them from their trance and sends them running back to their graves which they will then dig up and get back into.

One voodoo folklore story tells of a plantation owner who used zombies to tend to and work his fields. One day while he was away, his wife gave the zombie workers snacks which included crackers. The crackers had salt in them and soon after all the zombie workers ran back to their graves as fast as they could. The plantation owner arrived home to find all his workers gone.

There have been numerous investigations into the matter by scholars who have discovered that some native inhabitants with brain damage or disorders do in fact act in the ways that zombies are described as moving in Haiti folklore.

Some scholars insist that zombies are real and created by the use of a powder made by grinding up the puffer fish. Chemical analysis of such powders has shown there to be no types of poisons that would put a person into a trance-like state.

The first Hollywood productions of zombie movies weren't about flesh eaters but about these voodoo zombies. One early zombie film, "White Zombie" (1932), is about a young man who turns to a witch doctor (who uses zombies to run his mills) to turn his girlfriend into a zombie who will obey his commands.

"I Walked With a Zombie" (1943) details the life of Jessica, the wife of a plantation owner in the West Indies. Jessica is in some sort of mental trance and a visiting nurse turns to voodoo to try and cure Jessica of her ailment.

The flesh eating zombies we all know and love began to take shape in the 60s with such films as the cleverly named "Zombies," about a cancer researcher who discovers a drug that turns people into zombies and is forced to create a zombie army to control the world.

The modern zombie truly came into the limelight with 1968's "Night of the Living Dead," which introduced a new breed of zombie. Zombies created by random happenstance rather than voodoo or drugs. Zombies under the control of no sorcerer and driven only by their hunger for flesh.

Zombies that could only be stopped by a shot to the head and not by any voodoo ceremony. The only thing Romero seems to have kept from the original zombie is the slow, shambling walk and the trance-like state.

Thanks to Romero, the zombie became the new "it" monster in Hollywood and it wasn't long before we had all sorts of zombie films. Even foreign countries got into the act, with Italy producing some of the more violent and disgusting of the zombie flicks.

"Dawn of the Dead" in 1978 was the apex of the zombie's popularity and was arguably the best zombie movie to be released in the era (and possibly the best zombie movie of all time).

The public gradually became disenfranchised with the zombies shortly after Dawn's release and faded from existence after the excellent "Day of the Dead" (although not as excellent as the original script) and "Return of the Living Dead" in 1985.

The zombies lived on in the direct to video market and in the hearts of zombie lovers everywhere. But no, the zombie could not be suppressed forever.

The return of the zombie to the mainstream began outside of movies interestingly enough. It came thanks to Capcom's excellent Resident Evil series, the first of which felt heavily inspired by the claustrophobic nature of NOTLD.

A new generation was introduced to the terror of the flesh eaters and just how scary fighting the slowly moving dead could really be. The series went on to great success with its sequels and it wasn't long before a movie was planned, albeit more so for the popularity of the video game than of the zombies themselves. And so zombies would ride back into the limelight on the coattails of the video game movies.

But with the new fast paced world of video games, the zombie had to become fast paced as well. Modern movie zombies leap and jump around much more than a regular person could do, and even the original Resident Evil game was revised on Gamecube to feature fast zombies. The zombie movies have also switched to almost always creating their zombies by use of a virus or plague instead of just happenstance.

Another major change is the fact that zombies have been given the ability to express themselves and actually talk these days, which is something that doesn't sit well with me as they just don't have anything interesting to say (I'll admit that at least Return of the Living Dead's zombies were damn funny).

I've learned to get over these things as I'm just happy to have zombies back in the mainstream. The zombie has come a long way since its inception in voodoo religion. Where will it go from here?

The only available information on the upcoming Resident Evil 4 has Leon Kennedy battling not flesh eating zombies, but villagers under a voodoo trance in a West Indies island. Perhaps we've come full circle in the life of the zombie.

I'll be focusing on the traditional zombie that we're all familiar with in this series of articles. With that being the case, tomorrow will highlight the original "Night of the Living Dead" which gave us the definition of a modern zombie. Hopefully I'll be able to fully demonstrate how the zombie genre has changed in such a relatively short time span and all the twists and turns various filmmakers used to try and make the personalitly-less flesh eaters unique in their films.