Undead

Mummy · The Bandaged Dead — A Cursed Corpse Guarding the Tomb

The Mummy (English mummy, from Persian mumiya 'bitumen') is the undead embalmed corpse, wrapped in linen bandages, that rises from the tomb to take vengeance and curse the living. Its iconographic prototype is the ancient Egyptian mummification practice and afterlife belief: the seventy-day funerary rite — extraction of the brain through the nostril, separation of the viscera into four canopic jars dedicated to the sons of Horus (Imsety, Hapy, Duamutef, Qebehsenuef), natron desiccation, linen wrapping with embedded Book of the Dead amulets — was canonised from the Old Kingdom (c. 3000 BC) and refined through the New Kingdom (1550-1295 BC). Herodotus described the procedure in detail in Histories Book II (c. 440 BC). The 1922 November discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun (c. 1341-1323 BC) in the Valley of the Kings by the British archaeologist Howard Carter, and the April 1923 death of his patron Lord Carnarvon, globalised the 'Curse of the Pharaohs' legend. Karl Freund's Universal horror film The Mummy (1932), with Boris Karloff as Imhotep, fixed the cinematic canon of the vengeful resurrected mummy.

Ghoul · The Corpse-Eater — A Desert Monster That Digs Up and Devours the Dead

The Ghoul (English ghoul, from Arabic ghul) is the corpse-eating monster and shape-shifting cannibal of the desert and graveyard, originating in pre-Islamic Bedouin Arabian folklore of the Jahiliyyah (before the sixth century), transmitted through the One Thousand and One Nights (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah, compiled in the ninth century), and established in Western horror canon from the eighteenth century onwards. The etymology lies in Arabic ghul, from the verb ghala ('to seize, to snatch'). In Arabian folklore, the ghoul is a malevolent variety of jinn that haunts the desert to lure and devour travellers, possessing the power to transform into human or animal form (particularly the hyena) and disinterring corpses from graves. Antoine Galland's French translation of the Arabian Nights (1704-1717), William Beckford's Gothic novel Vathek (1786), and Lord Byron's poem The Giaour (1813) introduced the ghoul to Western literature, and H. P. Lovecraft's short story Pickman's Model (1927) and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927) established the modern horror canon of the ghoul as a foundational race of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Lich · The Undying Mage — An Archmage Who Refused Death by Sealing the Soul

The Lich (English Lich) is the powerful mage who has become an undead by obsession with knowledge and power, sealing the soul in a vessel called a phylactery so that it revives as long as the vessel survives, and is the canonical iconographic figure of the apex of mage-undead. The etymology lies in the Old English lic ('corpse, body'), and the general 'corpse' sense that appears in the eighth-century Old English epic Beowulf was specified in later English literature as the mage-undead meaning. The iconographic origin includes Clark Ashton Smith's pulp fantasy short story The Empire of the Necromancers (1932) and the undead mage Thulsa Doom in Robert E. Howard's Kull series (1934), but the decisive canonisation was Gary Gygax's short article The Lich in The Strategic Review Vol. 2 No. 4 published by TSR in May 1976, and the addition of the lich to page 61 of the first edition AD&D Monster Manual of January 1977. In Gygax's 1978 adventure module Tomb of Horrors (S1), the appearance of the demilich Acererak — the canon that even if the body is destroyed, as long as the phylactery sealing the soul survives, the lich revives — established the decisive canon. The Lich King Arthas Menethil in Blizzard's World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, released on 13 November 2008, settled the twenty-first-century global canon of the lich.

Wraith · The Vengeful Specter — A Dark Spirit That Lost Its Form, Leaving Only Hatred

The Wraith is an incorporeal undead spirit born from an intense grudge, hatred, or unfinished business, drifting as a shadowy or misty form after the loss of its body. The word first appears in English in 1513, in the Scottish translation of Virgil's Aeneid by Gavin Douglas, where it denotes a doppelganger-apparition signalling imminent or recent death. Through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish Gothic literature, especially Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, the wraith became established as a death-omen and avenging spirit of unfulfilled fate. J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) decisively redefined the figure as the Nazgul or Ringwraiths, the nine human kings whose souls were drained by Sauron's rings of power, and the 1974 first edition of Dungeons and Dragons canonised the wraith as an incorporeal undead monster vulnerable only to enchanted weapons. The wraith now stands as the archetype of the cold-radiating, life-draining, mostly intangible undead across modern fantasy gaming, action RPGs, and horror fiction.

Vampire · The Bloodsucker — Night's Aristocrat Living Immortal on the Blood of the Living

The Vampire (English Vampire, Slavic Upir or Vampir) is the undead who is dead yet has not died, sustaining immortality by drinking the blood of the living, possessed of pale skin, fangs, and a seductive charisma, transforming into bat, mist, or wolf — the canonical iconographic figure that originated in Slavic Eastern-European folklore and was completed in nineteenth-century English literature. The etymology derives from the Slavic upir (East Slavic) and vapir (South Slavic), and the first English use of vampire appears in the 1734 London Journal travel magazine. The iconographic origin is the resurrected-corpse tradition of Slavic folklore and the eighteenth-century Eastern European Vampire Panic (1725-1755 in Habsburg-occupied Serbia and Hungary), of which the decisive cases are the 1725 Petar Blagojevic affair in Kisilova, Serbia, and the 1726-1732 Arnold Paole affair in Medvegja, Serbia — the Visum et Repertum, the official 1732 Latin report by the Austrian-Habsburg military surgeon Johann Flueckinger, is the decisive textual canon that registered the vampire as an official subject in European academia. The Vampyre by John William Polidori (1795-1821), published on 1 April 1819 in the British New Monthly Magazine — written at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland in 1816 at the suggestion of Lord Byron together with Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) — is the origin of the English-literary vampire canon, and Bram Stoker's (1847-1912) Dracula, published in Britain on 26 May 1897, completed the decisive canon of the elegant, aristocratic modern vampire iconography.

Zombie · The Reanimated Corpse — Mindless Man-Eating Hordes of the Dead

The Zombie is the reanimated corpse that has lost reason and self, hungering for the flesh and brains of the living. The word descends from West African Kongo zumbi or nzambi ('spirit, soul, god'), carried through the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade to the Caribbean, where it embedded itself in Haitian Vodou. In Vodou tradition, a bokor (sorcerer) drugs a living person into a state of apparent death, buries them, and then disinters and enslaves the soulless body. Victor Halperin's White Zombie (1932) introduced the figure to cinema, but it was George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) that decisively broke with the Vodou tradition and established the modern flesh-eating, mass-attacking corpse iconography. Dawn of the Dead (1978), Resident Evil (1996), 28 Days Later (2002), and The Walking Dead (comics 2003, AMC television 2010 onward) have made the zombie the central horror figure of the early twenty-first century.

Skeleton Warrior · Undead Soldier — A warrior risen from death and granted unlife

The Skeleton Warrior (English Skeleton Warrior, Latin Sceletus Bellator) is the warrior-type undead composed of the bones of the dead, summoned or resurrected by magic, curse, or black sorcery, who fights with sword, spear, shield, and armour, possessed of pure skeletal frame without flesh or soul — the decisive canonical iconographic undead figure of modern Western fantasy. The English skeleton derives from the Greek skeleton ('dried corpse'), through the Latin sceleton, settling in English in the sixteenth century, and is depicted as an instrumental being without original personality or will, faithfully obeying only the commands of the Necromancer. The mythical archetype is the Spartoi (Sparta, 'the Sown Ones') of Cadmus in ancient Greek mythology — armed warriors who grew from the ground when Cadmus, by the instruction of the goddess Athena, sowed the teeth of a dragon he had killed. The decisive modern canon is the famous scene in the 19 July 1963 British release of the film Jason and the Argonauts directed by Don Chaffey (1917-1990) — the four-and-a-half-minute scene of seven skeleton warriors in stop-motion animation by the British cinema special-effects master Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013) duelling with the Greek hero Jason — the decisive canon of modern skeleton-warrior iconography. The Skeleton monster of the 1974 tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) by Gary Gygax (1938-2008), in the 1977 Monster Manual, established the canon of the modern fantasy RPG.

Ghost · The Wandering Spirit — A Soul Bound to the World by Attachment and Unfinished Story

The Ghost (English Ghost, Latin Spectrum) is the soul of the dead that, due to lingering attachment, grudge, or unresolved circumstance, cannot proceed to the afterworld and remains in this world, the canonical iconographic figure of universal worldwide post-mortem belief: transparent or translucent in form, bound to a specific place (haunted houses, old houses), and manifesting through the Poltergeist (German for 'noisy spirit'), cold draught, apparition, sound, and weeping. The English ghost derives from Old English gaast (soul, spirit), and the iconographic origin spans the gidim of Mesopotamia, the akh of ancient Egypt, the psyche and eidolon of ancient Greece, the lar (guardian spirit) and lemur of ancient Rome — universally from the post-mortem soul belief of every civilisation. The decisive Western textual canon is Letter 27 of Book 7 of the Epistulae of Pliny the Younger (61-113 CE) of the late first century CE — in which the Greek philosopher Athenodorus (74 BCE - 7 CE) encounters in a haunted Athens house an old man's ghost rattling chains, and excavates his burial place to grant him post-mortem rest — the decisive Western canon of the first haunted-house ghost story. The ghost of Hamlet's father in William Shakespeare's (1564-1616) tragedy Hamlet (1599-1601) established the English-literary ghost canon, and the Marley and three Spirits of Past, Present, and Future in Charles Dickens's (1812-1870) novella A Christmas Carol (published 19 December 1843) are the decisive work of the Victorian ghost canon.

Revenant · The Vengeful Returned — A Corpse Risen From the Grave for One Purpose

The Revenant (English revenant, from Latin revenans, 'the one returning') is a corpse that has risen from its grave on its own under the drive of intense vengeance or unresolved purpose, the medieval European iconographic figure of a self-aware undead retaining a distinct ego and a single purpose. The etymology lies in the Latin revenans, the present participle of the verb revenire ('to return'), which became the canonical term in eleventh- and twelfth-century Latin chronicles for the corpse that comes back from the grave to torment the village. The decisive textual source is the Historia Rerum Anglicarum (History of English Affairs) by the twelfth-century English chronicler William of Newburgh (c. 1136-1198), whose Book V chapters 22-24 record detailed cases of revenants in Buckinghamshire, Berwick, and Anant in northern England, establishing the decisive medieval European canon. Contemporary works such as Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium (Courtiers' Trifles, c. 1180) and the figure of Glam in the Saga of Grettir (Grettis Saga, thirteenth to fourteenth century) form the Northern-European revenant canon. Gary Gygax's first-edition Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual (1977) systematised the revenant as a self-aware undead obsessed with a single object of vengeance, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 2015 film The Revenant (starring Leonardo DiCaprio, winner of the Academy Award for Best Director) established the twenty-first-century cinematic canon of the figure.

Wight · The Barrow Dead — A Cursed Corpse Guarding the Tomb's Treasure

The Wight (English Wight, the barrow-dwelling variant being the Barrow-wight) is the graveyard undead in which a corpse buried in a barrow or burial mound has risen by reason of obsession with treasure and curse, and is the canonical iconographic figure of the self-aware corpse-form undead, in contrast to the incorporeal wraith. The etymology lies in the Old English wiht ('creature, being'), and the general 'being' sense that appears in the eighth-century Old English epic Beowulf was later specified as the graveyard-undead meaning. The iconographic origin is the draugr ('walking corpse') and haugbui ('mound-dweller') of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelandic family sagas, and the decisive English-literary canon is the Barrow-wight that appears in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring (Allen and Unwin, July 1954), Book One Chapter 8 'Fog on the Barrow-Downs', in which Frodo and the hobbits are captured by a Barrow-wight in the Barrow-downs east of the Old Forest and are to be buried with grave-goods but are rescued by Tom Bombadil's song. Gary Gygax's first edition AD&D Monster Manual of January 1977 added the wight as the undead canon of modern fantasy role-playing games, with the energy-draining ability by which the slain becomes a new wight.

Death Knight · The Knight of Death — A Specter-Warrior of Cursed Blade and Black Magic

The Death Knight (English Death Knight) is the warrior-undead at the apex of modern fantasy iconography, the corpse-knight that rises after death under the broken oath of its lifetime or under a binding curse; if the lich is the apex of mage-undead, the death knight is the apex of warrior-undead. The iconographic origin lies in the medieval European Arthurian tradition of the fallen knight — Mordred in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) — and the supernatural figure of the Green Knight in the late-fourteenth-century alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but the decisive canonisation was Gary Gygax's addition of the Death Knight to his AD&D Monster Manual II in July 1983. The canonical popular figure of the death knight is Lord Soth, a fallen Knight of Solamnia introduced in Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's 1984 D&D Dragonlance novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight, and the 2002 Blizzard Entertainment video game Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, in which the human prince Arthas Menethil falls to become the Death Knight of the Lich King Ner'zhul, established the decisive twenty-first-century canon. The November 2008 expansion World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King introduced the Death Knight as the first playable hero class in WoW, completing the gaming canon.