A zombie is a fictional monster, typically a reanimated human corpse. They are usually hungry for human flesh, often specifically brains. Sometimes they are victims of a pandemic illness causing the dead to reanimate or the living to behave this way, but often no cause is given in the story. Other types are living humans who are controlled by someone else using magic. These are the original zombies, occurring in the West African spiritual belief system of voodoo. Zombies became popular in modern horror fiction largely because of the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.
