October 27th, 2008 by The Toadmaster
Image credit: TCM Hitchhiker from Flickr
This is Part II of a a two part series on the history of zombies. Part I dealt with the origin in Haitian culture and creation of zombies. Part II is all about zombies in popular culture.
George Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, was the first portrayal of modern zombies in film (prior to this zombies were portrayed in line with their status in Haitian folklore) and was made in black and white with a limited budget, i.e. a classic indie film. He did his job so well that he established in the popular psyche the concept of zombies as mindless monsters with a craving for human flesh. Hordes of zombies.
Night of the Living Dead revolutionized the horror film genre. Its seemingly innocent rural and suburban American settings destabilized the viewer’s expectations of horror as something confined to exotic and unfamiliar locales. Romero eschewed rubber masks and outlandish costumes in favour of blood, guts, and gore, ushering in the splatter and slasher sub-genres. On top of the close-to-home scenery and visceral imagery, Night of the Living Dead realistically depicted the psychological horror of cannibalism, death and murder with enough gruesomeness to get the basic concepts across to the watchers but not so much that it prevented people from identifying with the main characters.
The characters of Night of the Living Dead are what made the film compelling and a classic of the horror genre. Their actions in the face of a slow-moving zombie apocalypse provide an interesting insight into how people deal with inevitability and hopelessness, when the biggest things to fear are your own mistakes, which will be relentlessly capitalized upon by the zombie horde.
Since Romero’s seminal film was made, many have built upon his foundation to produce films such as The Shining, The Omen, The Blair Witch Project, and The Exorcist. Romero’s masterpiece of horror and subsequent films have built the modern concept of zombiism and, over time, displaced the original voodoo practices with apocalypses, mindless hordes, survival (and associated weaponry!), and dread. One could almost correlate the change in our perception of zombies with the change in our perception of society and planet Earth…
October 27th, 2008 by The Toadmaster
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.