[custom_adv] A restaurant in Saudi Arabia is offering patrons in the conservative kingdom a unique experience — dishes with a side of skull and blood in the company of zombies and vampires. [custom_adv] The restaurant, “Shadows,” caters to horror film buffs with strong stomachs, allowing them to savor their dishes while staff in gory costumes put on interactive shows. [custom_adv] It’s located in the Boulevard entertainment district of the capital Riyadh and has opened as the Gulf country seeks to soften its image.“I came here to have fun and laugh… but the atmosphere and the shows are actually very scary,” one diner, Nora al-Assad, told AFP. [custom_adv] “I’ve lost my appetite,” added the 26-year-old who works in human resources, as a waiter presented her meal on a tray with a smiling black skull.“I like horror in general… I think the atmosphere is great and lots of fun,” she said, taking a selfie with a performer with a fake bleeding chest wound. [custom_adv] For businessman Sleiman al-Amri, the restaurant experience caters to his hunger for a good adrenaline rush.“We’re always looking for new and exciting things to do in Riyadh,” said the 45-year-old, dining with his family.Amri, wearing the traditional dishdasha robe, added: “Going to restaurants used to be about eating, getting full, chatting, and we’d go back home. [custom_adv] “But now we are eating, we are enjoying our time — and we’re also terrified.”The rise of Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in 2017 has ushered many sweeping reforms, with the kingdom opening its doors to tourists in 2020. [custom_adv] In the past, Saudis would have to go abroad for entertainment, but a social shift — including the opening of cinemas and mixed-gender concerts — has changed the local dynamic. [custom_adv] A zombie is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. Zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, in which a zombie is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magic like voodoo. [custom_adv] Modern media depictions of the reanimation of the dead often do not involve magic but rather science fictional methods such as carriers, radiation, mental diseases, vectors, pathogens, parasites, scientific accidents, etc.The English word "zombie" was first recorded in 1819, in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey, in the form of "zombi". [custom_adv] The Oxford English Dictionary gives the word's origin as West African and compares it to the Kongo words nzambi (god) and zumbi or nzumbi (fetish). Some authors also compare it to the Kongo word vumbi (mvumbi) (ghost, revenant, corpse that still retains the soul), (nvumbi) (body without a soul). [custom_adv] A Kimbundu-to-Portuguese dictionary from 1903 defines the related word nzumbi as soul, while a later Kimbundu–Portuguese dictionary defines it as being a "spirit that is supposed to wander the earth to torment the living". One of the first books to expose Western culture to the concept of the voodoo zombie was W. B. Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929), the account of a narrator who encounters voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls.
