Technical question.

[cookiebastard]

Is a Mummy a Zombie? Like, those walking Mummies in old '50s horror. They're dead people, right, and they walk. But they don't eat people like a regular zombie would. Maybe it's because their mouth is covered in gauze. But they usually just look like they're trying to strangle people, not eat them. So, does a Mummy count as a Zombie?

Comments

[grantb]

There's a straight answer to your question, but it'll get really mired in terminology.

No, mummies are not what we'd now call a zombie.

However, at the time The Mummy came out, mummies were basically the same as what were then called zombies.

What we now call zombies were originally (in cinema) called ghouls - in Night of the Living Dead, they're only ever called "ghouls" or "things" or "walking dead." NotLD created something new when it came out. Before that, there were reanimated corpses, but they didn't act the same way, didn't come into being in the same way, and told a different kind of story.

Old Zombie:
FEAR OF OTHER - brought into existence by magic, explicitly ANCIENT and FOREIGN, although almost always reawakened by a Kurtz-figure, one who "goes native" or "dabbles in the unknown." Examples would include White Zombie (Boris Karloff, plantation voodoo), Plague of Zombies (Satanists in African masks kill people & reanimate them in remote British town) and Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (evil theater director

[grantb]

For the sake of completion, I should mention that the European zombie tradition - movies including Zombie! (an Italian attempted sequel to NotLD), Cemetery Man (French-Italian production starring Rupert Everett) and all the Fulci movies - is doing something else altogether. Usually these are ghost stories that happen to have bodies in them; they rely far more on either metaphysical or philosophical questions, and the zombies are far more surreal. Like the Old Zombie, these Euro-zombies are kind of magical, but the magic is much more psychological in nature.

[cookiebastard]

Awesome. Question #2: Did Coverdale/Page vindicate Whitesnake, diminish Led Zeppelin, both, or neither. Please answer in the form of a sestina.

1.2.3. GO!

[grantb]

A sestina will take some time.

Plus, I don't really have much of an opinion on Coverdale/Page.

Zombies, now... zombies are important.

[shig23]

Another way of looking at mummies--the real Egyptian ones--was that they started as part of the search for immortality. I can see the logic going something like, "Normally, when someone dies, they rot and are ravaged by scavengers, until only scattered bones are left. But if we apply such-and-such procedures to the body, it retains some semblance of life. Maybe if we can get it just right, the body will appear so lifelike that it will actually return to life."

Some have even described mummies as an early attempt at suspended animation, in much the same way certain (very frightened and self-centered) people of today want to be frozen after their deaths, in hopes that future medicine will be able to cure whatever killed them. From there it's an easy leap for the modern fabulist to conceive of magical means for a soul to be reunited with its mummified remains, and live again. (Maybe the mummy's soul was stored in the same jars that held its internal organs, or something like that.)

The original Mummy, the one with Karloff, seemed to