In the film, a white couple visits Haiti, where they plan to get married.
Largely based on Seabrook’s accounts, it came out at the tail end of the Haitian occupation.
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The first zombie film - White Zombie (1932) - was released at the onset of the American horror movie genre, just one year after Dracula and Frankenstein.
But Seabrook, ignorant to this, sensationalized the account in his 1929 book The Magic Island - and in doing so, exposed America to the zombie. The catatonic beings before Seabrook’s eyes were most certainly slaves employed by American manufacturers, made to work 18-hour shifts and living in squalid conditions. … They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind but staring, unfocused, unseeing.” They were plodding like brutes, like automatons. “The supposed zombies continued dumbly at work. While researching voodoo in Port-au-Prince, Seabrook was taken to the Haitian American Sugar Company, where he was introduced to four “zombies.” In a late 1920s text, he recounted the moment: Voodoo practitioners in Haiti (circa 1860s). It was during this occupation that an American by the name of William Seabrook was made aware of the zombi. Voodoo culture was perceived to be a signifier of the country’s “ savage inferiority ” - and when the United States occupied Haiti in 1915, Catholic missionaries set out to dismantle it. The Haitians called this creature - suspended in some ambiguous state between life and death - a zombi.Īfter staging a successful slave rebellion and gaining independence from France in 1804, Haiti was demonized by the Western world as a threat to imperialism. During this time, the corpse would be susceptible to being revived by a bokor, or witch doctor, who would keep it as a personal slave, granting it no agency. The rural Haitian spiritual belief system - which was largely formulated by the millions of West African slaves the French brought to the country in the 17th century - held that those who died from an unnatural cause like murder would “linger” at their graves. Though various concepts of the dead rising date back thousands of years in many different cultural variations, the American depiction of the zombie was borrowed from 19th-century Haitian voodooism. From Haiti to Hollywood: fear of voodoo and primitive culture A depiction of Felicia Felix-Mentor, a Haitian “zombie” reported to be real in the 1930s. Among a sea of gaunt, gangling bodies, it hobbles over its own intestines and chatters its decaying teeth.īut looking back at the history of the zombie in American culture, from its entry into our consciousness to The Walking Dead, the creature is more than an aesthetic horror - it is a form of political commentary.įor 80 years, the undead have been used by filmmakers and writers as a metaphor for much deeper fears: racial sublimation, atomic destruction, communism, mass contagion, globalism - and, more than anything, each other. It lurches forward in tattered clothing, arms reaching out for supple flesh. It is gray-skinned and bloodied, missing a limb or an eyeball. The zombie, by its physical nature, inspires fear.
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