vovat | Undead and Ungone

The use of the term "undead" to refer to certain sorts of monstrous creatures might well have originated with Bram Stoker, who applied it to vampires. The actual definition of the term is a bit vague, so some types of beings sometimes count as undead and sometimes don't. Werewolves are sometimes grouped in with the undead, but I don't think they were originally, as there's no real connection between turning into a wolf and acting alive after death. Legends of vampires and other monsters eventually merged with those of werewolves, however. While Dracula's most famous alternate form is a bat, the novel clearly states that he could also turn into a wolf. The common ideas of lycanthropy being communicable and its victim becoming indestructible unless killed in a very specific way (silver being one popular killer of both werewolves and vampires) turned the werewolf into a sort of undead being, but not all modern werewolf stories hold to these concepts.

Zombies are very popular these days, although I'm not entirely sure why, as they have no real personalities. I guess there's a certain appeal to mindless grunts, though. Zombies are sort of like Goombas from the Mario series, or the Foot Soldiers from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons and video games. There are millions of them, and even though they're pretty dumb and not too hard to defeat individually, they just keep coming. And there isn't a whole lot of guilt involved in killing people who are already dead. The idea of zombies originates in Voodoo, and is thought by some to be based on the results of drugs. As voodoo zombies are said to be under the control of a sorcerer, I suppose they pretty much have to be mindless drones. I have seen attempts to give personalities to zombies, with my personal favorite being Reg Shoe from the Discworld series, who spends his spare time campaigning for rights for the undead. Can Discworld zombies, who have their own minds, often hold down steady jobs, and seem to achieve their undead state due to determination rather than magic, truly be considered zombies in the traditional sense? Maybe not, and there are a few lines in Reaper Man that suggest even the characters realize this, but "zombie" has come to be a pretty generic term for the animated undead. If you want to get technical about it, "revenant" is a more generic term for a reanimated corpse. There's also the lich, which developed by way of Dungeons & Dragons into a person who became undead by choice, and retains his or her original mind. I've seen it suggested on an Oz mailing list that the Wicked Witches of the East and West, kept alive only by means of their magic, could count as liches, but that might be a bit of a stretch.

I believe the idea of mummies as undead monsters originated with horror movies. While mummification was presumably intended to preserve the body for a person's journey to the next world, I don't know of any indication that the ancient Egyptians thought the bodies themselves would come back to life. The embalming process does add a certain amount of flavor to the zombie concept, though. And speaking of classic horror characters, I'm not exactly sure how to categorize Frankenstein's monster, who was brought to life through a scientific process, and was quite capable of human thought and emotion despite his hideous appearance.

Finally, we come to ghouls, and if the Wikipedia page is to be believed, they were originally demons from Middle Eastern folklore. They're known for eating the flesh of dead bodies (and apparently sometimes living ones as well) and taking the forms of the people they eat. The idea that zombies eat flesh as well was presumably borrowed from ghoul stories, and George Romero played a major part in popularizing the idea of reanimated corpses eating human flesh. I think it makes more sense for demon to eat bodies than for a revenant to do the same. Do zombies even have functioning digestive systems? Oh, well. As long as the rules are internally consistent and your vampires don't sparkle, you can pretty much do what you want with these undead monsters in your own fiction.