Horror and the Horror Film by Kawin Bruce F.;

Author:Kawin, Bruce F.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PERFORMING ARTS/Film and Video/History and Criticism
ISBN: 981587
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2012-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

Zombies: White Zombie and Night of the Living Dead

There are two kinds of zombies: mindless slaves and eaters of human flesh. The former are found primarily in Haiti, where voodoo priests and secret societies can condemn a person to zombification, particularly a person whose behavior has violated important social rules. The latter are the creation of George A. Romero,42 who introduced them in Night of the Living Dead (1968); they are not cannibals, strictly speaking, because they eat the living, not each other. In the movies, both kinds have returned from the dead, but they do not have the advanced faculties of vampires and other varieties of the living dead. Also unlike vampires, they are regularly found in groups. They shuffle or move slowly, their eyes are glassy and in most cases they cannot speak. Their motivations are simple: to follow orders, if they are slaves, or to find people and eat them. They do not have the manners of a vampire, the memory of a mummy or the continuity of personality of a ghost. They cannot be reasoned with and, short of destroying them in some special way, they cannot be stopped. Of all the living dead, they are the closest to dead. Except for their compulsions or the orders they obey, their brains are empty. The word “zombie” (or “zombi”) is derived from the African “nzambi,” which can refer to a god, a fetish or the spirit of a dead person.43

In his study The Serpent and the Rainbow, Wade Davis established that in Haiti those who become zombies are not brought back from the dead, but are given a poison that produces a state long indistinguishable from death (“long” because in the case of a genuinely dead person, putrefaction would set in after a while, whereas a zombie would not decay), with virtually undetectable reflexes, respiration and heartbeat. What is most undetectable is that the paralyzed victim is conscious, but is unable to tell those who are pronouncing him or her dead, and who go on to mourn and bury the body, that he or she is alive. After the victim has been buried, the bokor, a voodoo priest skilled in the uses of sorcery and black magic, unearths the person he drugged and administers another poison that wipes out the victim’s memory and higher functions (in some cases no second poison is used, only magic). At that point the victim is given a new name and a simple job and begins life as a mindless slave. The drugs do not accomplish zombification entirely on their own; cultural and religious beliefs influence the victim’s interpretation of what is happening to him or her during the burial and the reviving ceremony. The bokor may sell the victim or maintain control. There is no cure for these poisons, but in rare cases they can wear off.

The movies have shown little interest in anthropologically rigorous approaches to Haitian culture or religion. They have taken the concept of the zombie, the mindless walking dead, and run with it.

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