The disturbing origin of the popular zombie myth

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Zombies have a habit of always returning – and ‘The Walking Dead’ is back with its new series, which recently premiered in the United States. Walking Dead character Getty Images/via BBC Walking dead fans are abuzz with the recent US premiere of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, the latest continuation of the post-apocalyptic TV series. The new series – the seventh in the franchise – is set after the conclusion of the original series, with actors Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira returning as the characters Rick and Michonne. Some critics say the new series is “not quite the grand return we were hoping for.” For others, it’s “a powerful showcase” for Lincoln and Gurira and a gift to longtime fans. And these fans are many. The 2010-2022 original series is one of the biggest ever on cable TV. And it has been revived several times – after all, if there’s one thing we know for sure about zombies, it’s that they have a habit of always returning. But where did these creatures come from? The contemporary history of zombies is usually traced back to the horror film Night of the Living Dead (1968), by George Romero. In fact, the film doesn’t mention the word “zombie.” It is a very loose adaptation of the vampire novel I Am Legend (Ed. Aleph, 2015), by American writer Richard Matheson, originally published in 1954. In it, the last living human being tries to find a cure for the vampire virus. The history of zombie films seems to have started a little earlier, with Victor Halperin’s White Zombie. The film was released in 1932, months before Universal Studios’ famous adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula. White Zombie includes several detailed explanations of zombies for the North American public, transporting a series of beliefs from Haiti and the French Antilles into popular culture. The weight of voodoo is metaphorical and also political: ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, president of Haiti between 1957 and 1971, even stated that he was a Hungarian, a voodoo priest. Alamy/via BBC Some people speculate that the word “zombie” is derived from West African languages. Ndzumbi means “corpse” in the Gabon language Mitsogo, while nzambi means “spirit of a dead person” in the Congo language. In these regions, European slave ships forcibly transported immense quantities of people across the Atlantic Ocean to work on sugar cane plantations in the West Indies (the Antilles). The vast profits of the colonies fueled the growth of France and England, which became world powers. Africans took their religions with them, but French laws required enslaved people to convert to Catholicism. A series of elaborate synthesized religions then emerged, creatively mixing elements from different traditions: voodoo in Haiti, obeah in Jamaica and santería in Cuba. But what is a zombie? In Martinique and Haiti, zombie is a general term for spirit or ghost – any disturbing presence at night that can take different forms. The term coalesced, little by little, around the belief that a bokor, or witch doctor, could restore the life of his apparently dead victim, whether with magic, a powerful hypnotic suggestion or, perhaps, a secret potion. The bokor would then revive her as his personal slave, capturing her soul or will. The zombie, therefore, is the logical result of being enslaved: he has no will, no name, and has been captured in a living death of endless labor. Fires in Chile: Brazilian reports scenes similar to ‘The Walking Dead’, cars in the opposite direction, exploding cylinders and ‘apocalyptic scenario’ The discovery of zombies The imperial nations of the northern hemisphere became obsessed with voodoo in Haiti for a specific reason. Conditions in the then-French colony were so frightening and the death rate among the enslaved was so high that a rebellion eventually overthrew the planters in 1791. After a long revolutionary war, its French name Saint-Domingue was replaced by Haiti and the nation became the first independent black republic in 1804. But the very existence of the new country was considered an offense to European empires. For this reason, the nation was insistently demonized as a place of violence, superstition and death throughout the 19th century, when reports of cannibalism, human sacrifices and dangerous mystical rituals were constant in Haiti. Zombies may represent a metaphor for slavery. But North American filmmakers appropriated this concept to produce horror films. United Artists/via BBC Only in the 20th century, after the United States occupied Haiti in 1915, did these stories and rumors about zombies begin to take hold. American forces attempted to systematically destroy the native religion of voodoo, which, of course, only served to reinforce their power. The release date of the film White Zombie is significant, in 1932, shortly before the end of the occupation of Haiti by the Americans. The troops left the country in 1934. The United States attempted to “modernize” a country considered backward, but returned home carrying the country’s “primitive” superstition. Popular American magazines in the 1920s and 1930s increasingly published stories about vengeful undead rising from the graves to hunt their killers. They were immaterial specters, who transformed into the actual physical form of staggering, decaying corpses, said to have emerged from cemeteries in Haiti. But it wasn’t popular fiction that really brought zombies into America’s supernatural pantheon. Two important writers from the late 1920s not only traveled to Haiti but claimed something extraordinary: they had encountered real zombies! It wasn’t just an imaginary gothic attraction: zombies, they said, really existed. Journalist, occultist, travel writer, and alcoholic William Seabrook (1884-1945) traveled to Haiti in 1927. He wrote a book about the trip, titled The Island of Magic (Ed. Hemus, 2010). Seabrook had previously practiced whirling dances with dervishes in Arabia and tried to join a cannibal cult in West Africa. In Haiti, he was soon initiated into voodoo ceremonies and claimed to have been possessed by the gods. In a chapter about dead men working in the sugarcane field, the mention of zombies leads a local man to take Seabrook to the plantation of the Haitian-American Sugar Corporation. There, he introduced the writer to the “zombies” who worked at night in the sugar cane fields. “The worst thing was his eyes,” Seabrook describes. “They were, indeed, like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but fixed, unfocused, unseeing.” Seabrook momentarily panics, believing that all the superstitions he had heard were true, until he found a rational explanation: they were “nothing more than poor, insane ordinary human beings, forced to toil in the fields”. This chapter was the basis of the film Zumbi Branco. Seabrook often stated that he was responsible for bringing the word “zombie” into the American vocabulary. Immortal legend The other writer was the prestigious black novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). Many writers of the Harlem Renaissance in New York (USA) in the 1920s and 1930s were interested in Haiti as a model of black independence. They protested against the American occupation. But Hurston, more conservative, was in favor of the occupation. Hurston stood out for studying anthropology as a profession. She was sent to study “hudu” (Louisiana’s African-American version of voodoo) in New Orleans and then spent several months in Haiti training to be a voodoo priestess. Hurston became increasingly frightened by her experiences, although her anthropological accounts are cautious in this regard. But, in his informal travel book about Haiti, Tell My Horse, from 1937, Hurston reports that zombies exist and states: “I had the rare opportunity to see and touch an authentic case”. “I heard the cracking noises in his throat and then I did what no one had done before: I photographed him,” she says. The image of Felicia Felix-Mentor, the “real-life” zombie, is indeed quite frightening. Shortly after this meeting, Hurston rushed out of Haiti, believing that secret voodoo societies intended to poison her. If Hurston did indeed encounter a zombie in Haiti, the poor woman she photographed might not be an undead creature at all, but a person who suffered social death by being expelled from her community. Perhaps she also suffered from profound mental illnesses. After all, Hurston met her in one of Haiti’s mental health hospitals. But the historical trauma of slavery corroborates this terrible condition of being emptied of self – a bondless woman left wandering for a living death. The Walking Dead is another fruit of this story. The series made very little use of these backgrounds, but several of the survivors’ connections passed through Georgia, in the United States – through abandoned settings that, one day, housed huge plantations maintained by enslaved people. Knowing the history of zombies is understanding the anxieties that this figure still causes in contemporary American culture, which considers ethnicity an issue of fundamental importance to this day. *Roger Luckhurst is the author of the book Zombies: A Cultural History (“Zombies: a cultural history”, in free translation), published by the British publisher Reaktion Press. Read the original version of this report (in English) on the BBC Culture website. See also: Should adult Harry Potter fans ‘grow up’ and ‘outgrow’ the franchise? The Last of Us: is it possible for a fungal pandemic to create zombies in real life? Oscar 2024: naked on stage, fall on the red carpet, pregnancy announcement and more moments that marked the ceremony

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