Ghosts and Ghouls - Stage 5 Comp - Zombies - Comprehension Pack.pdf

STAGE 5 Unit focus: Ghosts And Ghouls Text focus: Information Text Zombies “Brains!” The cry of the zombie will be familiar to anybody who has seen a modern zombie film. The...

STAGE 5 Unit focus: Ghosts And Ghouls Text focus: Information Text Zombies “Brains!” The cry of the zombie will be familiar to anybody who has seen a modern zombie film. They are usually mindless monsters obsessed with eating the brains of the living. They haven’t always been this way. In fact, the idea of zombies has a much longer history than that of films. Wherever they come from, most zombies don’t have free will; they aren’t able to control themselves. The original zombies seem to come from Haitian folklore. On the island of Haiti, there were legends of witch doctors who would bring corpses back from the dead and use them as slaves. These original zombies (or “zombi” in Haitian French) were reanimated through magic. Modern zombies tend to be brought about by science fiction methods, such as viruses or parasites, etc. The word zombie seems to have first appeared in English in 1819. The poet Robert Southey was writing a history of Brazil and described the leader of a tribe as the “zombi”. It seems to have a meaning closer to “god” there, though. The word also seems to link to lots of African languages. Their versions of the word relate to ghosts, gods and more spiritual things rather than brain-obsessed monsters. During the late 19th and early 20th century, Europeans were exploring the world and became intrigued by the mystical powers that distant tribes seemed to possess. The Haitians practised a form of voodoo, and the idea of a voodoo zombie reached Europe in 1929. Lots of the stories that were told about these tribes at the time were designed to make them seem savage or less than human, so we have to treat them with caution. The person who did most to give us the modern idea of a zombie was George A. Romero. He wrote and directed the film Night of the Living Dead in 1968. The story is about a A group of people trapped in a farmhouse being attacked by reanimated ding ro Rea und all resources ©2024 Literacy Shed e um C u r r ic ul Th http://www.literacyshedplus.com corpses. They were called “ghouls” in the film, but they pretty much set the template for modern film zombies. Michael Jackson made zombies even more popular in 1983 when he released the video for his song “Thriller”. The music video was over 14 minutes long and told the story of Jackson and his girlfriend becoming stranded in a forest. Jackson turns into a werewolf and leads a pack of zombies after her. All very strange! The zombie genre wasn’t very popular for much of the 1980s. In the 1990s, zombie computer games like Resident Evil brought it back, and many more films were made in the 2000s. In the 2010s, directors started to explore the idea of friendly zombies. Some of them even fell in love with humans. However they are presented, most people still associate zombies with creepy, mindless monsters intent on eating their precious grey matter! RETRIEVAL FOCUS 1. Where does the word “zombie” first seem to have come from? 2. When did the idea of a voodoo zombie reach Europe? 3. When was the Night of the Living Dead film release? 4. Who sang “Thriller”? 5. What were zombies called in Night of the Living Dead? VIPERS QUESTIONS V Which word means that zombies want only one thing? V Which word describes zombies as not being able to think for themselves? S How were Brazillian zombies different to those we might recognise? P Why might we find zombies so scary and exciting? S How did games like Resident Evil help the idea of zombies? all resources ©2024 Literacy Shed http://www.literacyshedplus.com