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Undead

Beings in mythology and fiction

  • 4 min read
  • 3 chapters

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The undead are featured in the belief systems of most cultures, and appear in many works of fantasy and horror fiction. The term is also occasionally used for real-life attempts to resurrect the dead with science and technology, from early experiments like Robert E. Cornish's to future sciences such as "chemical brain preservation" and "cryonics." While the term usually refers to corporeal entities, in some cases (for example, in Dungeons & Dragons), the term also includes incorporeal forms of the dead, such as ghosts.

History

Bram Stoker considered using the title, The Undead, for his novel Dracula (1897), and use of the term in the novel is mostly responsible for the modern sense of the word. The word does appear in English before Stoker but with the more literal sense of "alive" or "not dead", for which citations can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary. In one passage of Dracula, Nosferatu is given as an "Eastern European" synonym for "un-dead".

Stoker's use of the term "undead" refers only to vampires; the extension to other types of supernatural being arose later. Most commonly, it is now taken to refer to supernatural beings which had at one point been alive and continue to display some aspects of life after death, but the usage is highly variable.

Reanimation or the creation of zombies through non-supernatural means has been a trope since at least the 19th century. Frankenstein used unspecified scientific means; mechanisms in more recent stories include bacteria (I Am Legend), radiation (Night of the Living Dead), and toxic waste (The Return of the Living Dead).

The undead have become popular adversaries in fantasy and horror settings, featuring prominently in many role-playing games, role-playing video games, MMORPGs and strategy games.

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