They came to the United States via the voodoo

Surely the movie struck a chord with audiences because of the Cold War environment in which it was produced.Zombies have a relatively recent provenance in American culture compared to witches or vampires. They came to the United States via the voodoo cults of Haiti, themselves an import from West Africa. The first zombie movie came out in the 1930s, and EC Comics nurtured the zombie meme in its comic books in the 1950s. The undead enjoyed a revival with the infamous "Night of the Living Dead," the 1968 horror flick by George Romero. Since then, it's been a steady increase in zombie and zombie-like films, with a significant spike after 2000.It's this tremendous increase over the last decade that really interests me. I attribute the huge bump to the intersection of three trends: war, pandemics, and globalization.First and foremost, zombie books and movies are all about war: them versus us. In retrospect, it seems as if we've been fighting zombies for ages. From World War II on, our war films have depicted courageous individuals facing down the faceless hordes. In "Bataan" (1943), Robert Taylor ends the film behind a machine gun, confronting an endless wave of Japanese soldiers. The million-man Chinese volunteer army that bailed out the North Koreans during the Korean War was frequently presented as a "horde" of combatants that just kept coming. The Vietcong were similarly relentless and seemingly ineradicable. And in both wars, U.S. soldiers and TV viewers faced a bewildering situation in which our allies suddenly became our enemies-South Vietnamese into North Vietnamese, South Koreans into North Koreans-after some inexplicable "infection" addled their brains. Of course, to those folks American soldiers were the inscrutable invaders, plodding zombie-like into their lives.Wars coincide with an uptick in zombie movies, and never more obviously than after Sept. 11. Al-Qaeda and its suicide bombers presented another adversary with a cult of death supposedly different from our own. Attacked for the first time since Pearl Harbor, America imagined itself surrounded by enemies. Even though the homeland was not in fact surrounded, the Bush administration put American troops into situations-Afghanistan, Iraq-in which they truly were surrounded.