In the episode of Game of Thrones titled The Door, much was revealed about the White Walkers, a group of otherworldly super-beings created by the now-extinct race of the so-called Children of the Forest, or the original inhabitants of the Westeros kingdom. Both visually and in terms of abilities, the White Walkers and their army of undead, called the Wights, draw on a wide host of fantasy sources and appear almost ethereal.
Undead armies have frequently popped up in the movies. Among the more frightening creatures in the Lord of the Rings are the Nazguls. Difficult to kill? Human beings corrupted into dark beings? Unusual steads? An ever present danger, always lurking somewhere in the shadows? Yes, yes, yes and yes.
The makers of the Game of Thrones adaptation of George RR Martin’s fantasy novels seem to have been inspired by Peter Jackson’s movie adaptations of JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings novels. The White Walkers mythos draws upon the army of the undead that Aragorn leads into battle in The Return of the King. The White Walkers, with their transparent skin and wispy hair resemble ghosts and spirits, but they lack the ability to move through walls. On a visual level and in the way in which their army and hierarchies seem to be arranged with the Night King at the top, they are quite like the Orcs.
The groups of humans corrupted into darker beings and traversing between the worlds of the living and the world of the dead include the posse of Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Carribean movies. Jones (played by Bill Nighy) was a human who literally lost his heart after a failed love affair. He has no soul and roams the high seas with an army of undead creatures. Although Jones’s journey might have been different, he and the White Walkers both come to the same end point.
Curiosity is a big factor in unleashing the undead. If the characters from The Mummy (1999) had chosen not to fiddle with the treasures of the past, Imhotep would never been born again. When he is finally brought back from the dead, he wrecks havoc and seeks to take over the world.
The Wights have another provenance. They might not be infected and do not move very slowly, but for all intents and purposes, they are zombies.
The most prominent use of zombies was in George A Romero’s classics Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978). The zombies here were slow-moving, devoid of intelligence and seemed to have no motives apart from the unquenchable desire to feast on human flesh.
Dan O’Bannon’s horror comedy Return of the Living Dead (1985) features high-speed zombies, for a change. In Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), the creatures have not risen from the dead and have been infected by a virus, but are also classified as zombies.
Even visually, with what looks like rotting flesh and organs that are visible to the naked eye, the White Walkers draw on the zombie mythos. Zombies, of course, have a long literary history. The earliest beings to have been resurrected from the dead? One Lazarus of Bethany and one Jesus of Nazareth.
