Image credit: TCM Hitchhiker from Flickr

Zombies, as horror film watchers will know, are reanimated human corpses. They can walk, eat, hear and even speak but are hampered by total amnesia and lack of higher brain function. Zombies have their origin in Haitian voodoo culture, where the Haitian Creole word zonbi translates to ‘spirit of the dead’.

According to Haitian folklore, zombies are created by voodoo priests called Bokor, who have the ability to resurrect bodies using a powder called coup de poudre. Coup de poudre is made using the same poison found in fugu (read more about fugu here). It is either given orally to a person or introduced via a flesh wound. This is while the victim is alive of course. The toxin slows the heart rate, reduced body temperature, and generally reduces metabolic activity until the afflicted person reaches a death-like state.

People are typically buried as soon as possible after death in Haiti, because the tropical climate of the island makes it difficult to store bodies for long without them decomposing. Once the funeral is over the Bokor dig up the bodies before the drugs wear off and voila! a zombie is created.

Potential zombies are chosen because they are people unwanted or disliked by their community. People who will not be missed. The Bokor use the reanimated bodies for hard labour tasks in Haiti’s sugar cane plantations, keeping them in a zombie state with continuous doses of hallucinogens, such as datura (read more about datura here) or the secretions of the cane toad (read more about cane toad poison here).

In 1835, Haitian law was changed and classified the practice of administering drugs in order to make a person appear dead as attempted murder. When a victim appeared deceased, was subsequently buried and thus, died a real death from asphyxiation, starvation, or lack of medical care, the perpetrator was charged with murder (Article 246 of the Haitian Penal Code). Whether this law change was prompted by real life cases of zombies or merely talk of zombies is unknown.

The best documented case of a possible zombie is that of Clairvius Narcisse, who was supposed to have died from an unknown cause in 1962. Before his death, he had argued with his brother about selling a share of the family land. His brother arranged for Clairvius’ ‘death’ and permitted the Bokor to retrieve his body from the grave and put him to use slaving on a sugar cane plantation. In 1964, the zombie master himself died and Clairvius’ spent the next 16 years wandering around Haiti in a psychotic state as the powerful drugs wore off. Eventually, in 1980, he recognised his sister in a market place and proved his identity (his family had thought him long dead). His story and recovery were documented by ethnobiologist Dr. Wade Davis.

The apocalyptic popular culture notion of zombies as hordes of mindless monsters craving human flesh split from the true concept of zombiism in 1968 with the advent of George Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead.

Read the second part of this post.