Editing Undead (section)

== 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 (word)|Nosferatu]]'' is given as an "Eastern European" synonym for "un-dead".<ref>*{{cite book | last = Stoker | first = Bram | editor = [[Leonard Wolf]] | title = The Annotated Dracula | publisher = Crown | year = 1975 | orig-year =1897 | isbn = 978-0-517-52017-8 | page= 193 }}</ref>

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.<ref>{{cite web | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030216141734/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=BieCans.sgm&images=images%2Fmodeng&data=%2Ftexts%2Fenglish%2Fmodeng%2Fparsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1 | archive-date=2003-02-16 | url=http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=BieCans.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1 | title=Can Such Things Be | publisher=Etext.virginia.edu | access-date=2012-07-31 | url-status=dead }}</ref>

Reanimation or the creation of zombies through non-supernatural means has become a trope since at least the 19th century. ''[[Frankenstein]]'' (1818) used unspecified technological means, the influential ''[[I Am Legend (novel)|I Am Legend]]'' (1954)  blamed a germ, ''[[Night of the Living Dead (1968 film)|Night of the Living Dead]]'' (1968) proposed radiation from a downed space probe, ''[[The Return of the Living Dead]]'' (1985) depicted a toxic gas, and ''[[Resident Evil (1996 video game)|Resident Evil]]'' (1996) featured a bioweapon.

The undead have become popular adversaries in fantasy and horror settings, featuring prominently in many [[role-playing game]]s, [[role-playing video game]]s, [[MMORPG]]s and [[strategy games]].