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Zombies were originally seen as the reanimated bodies of people who have supposedly died and have been revived through the use of "voodoo." More lately, zombies are simply reanimated corpses intent on catching the living and eating their brains.

The idea of the zombie (or zombi) in Haitian folklore is pervasive but not clearly defined. In general, a zombie is a person who has had his or her soul/awareness/will/ memory stolen by a "voodoo" sorcerer via a spell or potion. Once in the sorcerer's power, the zombie becomes his slave. The zombie may have been killed and reanimated or merely been drugged/spelled into a deceptive deathlike state.

Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis claimed in his 1985 book, The Serpent And The Rainbow (and Passage Of Darkness: The Ethnobiology Of The Haitian Zombie, 1988) to have observed the manufacture of a batch of zombie powder and collected eight samples. Davis infers that tetrodotoxin (tetrodotoxin is the lethal toxin found in the Japanese delicacy fugu, or pufferfish) was found in these samples and is the drug used to create zombies. Davis's theory has been disputed by scientists and the chemist Davis used is now "embarrassed" by his involvement. Roland Littlewood of the department of anthropology and psychiatry at London's University College and Dr. Chavannes Douyon of the Polyclinique Medica in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, theorized in a paper published in the British medical journal The Lancet in 1997, that many so-called zombies may in fact be individuals with psychiatric disorders or brain damage.

As a "horror archetype," the zombie was introduced into the American consciousness by a combination of nonfiction, history, and film. The zombie has no real roots in literature and owes its iconization—in both the "traditional voodoo" form and as the modern brain-eating monster—to Movies rather than Literature.

Although combinations of "voodoo," magic, reviving the dead, and even variations of the word "zombie", are found in 19th century literature, William B. Seabrook first associated the concept of the living dead with the word "zombie" for Americans in The Magic Island, published in 1929. (From Chapter Two "Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields": ". . . while the zombie came from the grave, it was neither a ghost, nor yet a person who had been raised from the dead like Lazarus. The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life—it is a dead body made to walk and act and move as if it were alive . . ."

In the chapter, Seabrook's Haitian informant takes him to see zombies at work in that fields and they make a vivid impression: "The eyes were the worst. It was not my imagination. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing. The whole face, for that matter, was bad enough. It was vacant, as if there was nothing behind it. It seemed not only expressionless, but incapable of expression."

However, he decides they are "ordinary demented human beings, idiots, forced to work in the fields." Seabrook then consults a learned Haitian who posits, by showing Seabrook an article in the penal code which declares such acts murder, that the zombies may have been thought to be dead by their relatives and buried after being put into a lethargic coma by "substances" administered by another.

It is from this chapter that the 1932 movie White Zombie drew its inspiration. Produced by minor independent filmmakers Edward Halperin and Victor Halperin and directed by Victor Halperin from a script by Garnett Weston, it was picked up for distribution by United Artists. The story concerns a young couple, Neil Parker (John Harron) and Madeleine Short (Madge Bellamy), who have been invited by Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer) to be married at his Haitian plantation. Beaumont, however, really hopes to steal Madeleine's affections. Once rebuffed, he approaches the local white "voodoo" master, the sinister "Murder" Legendre (Bela Lugosi), who runs a sugarcane plantation and mill, to use his mysterious powder to zombify Madeleine and have her declared dead. With the grieving Neil out of the way, Beaumont plans to revive and win her. Legendre, however, has his own plans for Madeleine and for Beaumont.

There is meaning and timeliness to the film that has been, for the most part, forgotten. To understand it, one must consider history. Haiti was much in the American mind during the late-1920s and early 1930s. U.S. Marines had occupied Haiti since 1915. Most Haitians believed that the Marines had been sent to protect U.S. investments and to establish a base to protect the approaches to the Panama Canal. A series of revolts against U.S. rule began in 1929 to protest, in part, the U.S. use of forced labor -- chain-gangs with armed guards permitted to shoot anyone who fled compulsory service -- to build roads. (Seabrook's zombie tale included a Haitian alleging that zombies had been used in an American corporation's cane fields, albeit unknown to the corporation.) In 1930 a U.S. presidential commission recommended that Haiti be allowed to elect a legislature that could name a president. The legislators chose Sténio Vincent, an opponent of the occupation. The Marines were finally withdrawn in 1934, although U.S. fiscal control was maintained until 1947.

White Zombie inspired other lesser zombie films and elements of the voodoo-zombie image. True zombie tales, however, remained rare in fiction. The modern horror icon arose from George A. Romero's film Night Of The Living Dead (1968)—even though the word "zombie" is never used in the movie and Romero himself thought of his flesh-eating living dead as "ghouls". (Ghouls are also difficult to pin down to a definition, but generally they are seen as living monsters who haunt cemeteries, rob graves, and eat the flesh of the dead.) In Night Of The Living Dead the dead return to life and seek human victims. Exactly why this is happening is ambiguous throughout the film. Although a reference is made to a returning spacecraft harboring unknown radiation from Venus, Romero has stated he did not mean to imply that radiation was the cause of the reanimation of the dead.

Whatever the intent, the modern zombie had been invented. Zombies were no longer merely shuffling, scary, but evidently benign voodoo-ensorcelled slaves. The new zombies:

• ate human flesh
• could only be stopped by a shot or heavy blow to the head
• arose from death as the result of a virus (or maybe radiation)
• could pass zombie-ism on to others

Romero's subsequent films, Dawn Of The Dead (1978) and Day Of The Dead (1985) added further to the basic myth. Zombies in the third film were seen as a new non-human race competing with humankind. As David J. Schow has noted in the Afterword to his collection Zombie Jam: "The plain fact is that the aptly christened 'Romero zombies' have infiltrated the culture to the extent that even people who have never experienced the movies 'know' what zombies are...: They're dead, they walk, they want to eat you, they usually outnumber you. The codicil, courtesy of Dan O'Bannon's Return Of The Living Dead (1985) is that they want to eat your brains, in particular . . ."

This new monster-virus quickly infected horror writers—during a period when horror fiction as a commercial genre was at its height—and novels and short stories began to bloom. Among the most notable zombie-inspired fiction of the 1980's are Dead In The West by Joe R. Lansdale (1986) and Book Of The Dead (1989) edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector, an anthology of stories directly inspired by and drawing upon the theme of Romero's movie. The 1990's brought a flood of zombie books, the best of which are probably Dan Simmons' Summer Of Night (1991), Book Of The Dead 2: Still Dead (1992), and (although padded a bit with revenant stories) Stephen Jones' 1993 The Mammoth Book Of Zombies. Zombies also began appearing in collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering and video games like Zombies Ate My Neighbors and the Resident Evil series. That Romero zombies have remained a fascination into the new century is made obvious by a 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead, Shaun of the Dead (2004), Romero's Land Of The Dead (2005) and by publication of Stephen King's novel Cell (2006), involving zombies caused by radiation emitted by mobile phones, and Mondo Zombie edited by John Skipp (2006.)

External Links

Littlewood-Douyon Article