A zombie history lesson.
What do you consider to be the quintessential zombie movie?
For vampires, it's Dracula. For mummies, The Mummy. For evil clowns, it's It. For serial killers, maybe Psycho or Halloween. For some horror archetypes, like demons, ghosts, and witches, it's a little more up for debate. For zombies, your mind might turn to George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, the film that made zombies what they are today. I'd be inclined to agree with you – Night of the Living Dead has all the hallmarks of a classic monster movie: it popularized zombies in Hollywood, it helped define zombie lore as we know it today, and it's widely recognized as the first modern zombie movie.
The thing is, it wasn't the first zombie movie. In fact, at the time it came out it wasn't a zombie movie at all; Romero referred to the creatures in his film as "ghouls". Zombies were something else entirely: a bit of Haitian folklore, and a far cry from anything in Romero's work.
The idea of zombies comes from Haitian Voodoo (or Vodou), a religion common in 16th-19th century Haiti. At the time, Haiti was under French colonial rule, and hundreds of thousands of slaves had been brought over from Africa to produce sugar and coffee. It was common for slaves to commit suicide, as death was the only escape from slavery. Committing suicide meant forgoing the ability to return to Lan Guinée (Africa), where the Haitians believed that souls would return in death. Instead, the souls of slaves who killed themselves would remain on the plantations even in the afterlife.
Tales began to arise of sorcerers, or Bokor, killing people and then bringing them back from the dead as mindless automatons who did whatever they were told with no thought or feelings of their own. These stories reflected the horrible conditions that slaves faced, the way they were treated as inhuman, and their inability to escape slavery even by literally dying. The French colonialists were eventually overthrown in the Haitian Revolution, and by 1804 Haiti became independent – until 1915, when it was occupied by the United States. However, the legend of zombies lived on – and in 1932, it was appropriated by Hollywood for a film aptly titled White Zombie.
The film follows a couple, Madeleine and Neil, as they visit a Haitian slave plantation, which is run entirely by zombies, only for Madeleine to be turned into a zombie herself by a "voodoo master" played by Bela Lugosi. While the film is set in American-occupied Haiti, and inspired by Haitian mythology, most of the characters are white – even the so called "voodoo master". At the end of the film, Madeleine is able to become unzombified and return to her normal life, but the zombie slaves running the plantation end up walking off a cliff. While zombie narratives in Haitian mythology acted as an allegory for the horrors of slavery, White Zombie portrayed the slaves themselves as the monsters, unable to be redeemed even when they are set free.
At the time, the casual racism in the film – which featured lines such as "Haiti is full of nonsense and superstition" – was considered relatively innocuous. Even the way that zombies were appropriated from Haitian culture and changed to reflect white fears with little regard for the original sanctity or symbolism wasn't particularly out of the ordinary. The history of zombies is something akin to that of rock and roll: something created by Black people was co-opted by a group of white people and became an American zeitgeist, leading to a widespread misattribution of credit and lack of knowledge about the actual origins.
If zombies are rock and roll, George A. Romero is perhaps best compared to Elvis Presley. Romero didn't invent zombies – he just popularized them (or a version of them), and as a result he was dubbed the Father of Zombies. That's not to say Romero doesn't deserve any credit in creating the version of zombies we know today; his films changed zombie movies forever, in part because he was initially designing a monster that was meant to be completely separate from Haitian zombies. Romero didn't start using the term zombie until after it was used by fans of Night of the Living Dead – fans who likely associated it with the likes of White Zombie, understanding zombies to be villains and not victims.
The zombies of today usually become zombies due to a virus; if someone actively made them into a zombie, that someone was probably a zombie themselves. No Bokor or "evil voodoo master" is enthralling them. It's common for the horror in zombie films to come less from the zombies and more from the surviving people now having to navigate a horrific situation. The zombies are just a backdrop; a driving force which leads people to reveal their true nature. Zombies have been used to represent any number of fears in American culture: consumerism, the Vietnam war, terrorism, viral infection. They've become omnipresent – everybody knows what a zombie is.
The creatures we call zombies today are inextricably linked with Haitian zombies, but they aren't the same. While Haitian zombies were an allegory for the horrible conditions and dehumanization faced by slaves, American zombies – Romero's zombies – are a product of American fears, and essentially a different creature to Haitian zombies – they operate by different rules, they look different, they represent different things, and they have a different mythology.
So, is Night of the Living Dead still the quintessential zombie film? Well, I think there's a case for saying yes, at least as far as the modern American zombie goes. However, I also think there's something to be gained by looking at what came before Romero, and learning about the true history of the zombie – without whitewashing it.
Comments