Living Dead fans rejoice at the premiere of the television series The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Livea production that comes from the famous zombie franchise.
But, beyond the fact that critics did not like the series, the truth is that the drawing power that the franchise has was clear. The Walking Dead. The Serie original, which was produced from 2010 to 2022, It became one of the great titles of the series that were broadcast on cable, for which attempts have been made to revive in different ways. And that has a reason: Zombie stories have the peculiarity of coming back to life. Of returning from his own death.
But what is the origin of these stories that fascinate many people around the world? It is usual to place George Romero’s 1968 film as the beginning of everything, The night of the Living Dead.
The curious thing is that this film, considered low budget, never uses the word zombie, in addition to being a very free adaptation of the vampire novel by Richard Matheson. I’m legendin which the last man alive tries to find a cure for a virus spread by vampires.
But a book The history of zombie moviessuggests a more remote start: The white zombie ddirector Victor Halperin which was released in 1932. This film fIt was released in the middle of two premieres that would become famous: Universal Studios’ adaptation of the Dracula and Frankenstein stories.
Now in The white zombie There are many laborious explanations about the zombie and its origin for the American audience, because it transports into popular culture a series of beliefs that exist in Haiti and the French Antilles. There is speculation that The word “zombie” comes from the languages spoken in West Africa -for example, ndzumbi means “corpse” in mitsogo and nzambi means “spirit of the dead person” in Kongo.
And from this region of the world thousands of people were transported to work as slaves on sugar plantations in the West Indies located in the Caribbean Sea, whose economic benefit from the abuse of these people allowed France and England to become global powers. .
Although the Africans brought their religion with them, French law required them to convert to Catholicism, which originated a series of synthetic religions that would end up being known as voodoo in Haiti, obayi in Jamaica or Santeria in Cuba..
What is a zombie? In Martinique and Haiti, it may be a general term for a spirit or ghost, or any strange presence during the night that can take different forms.
But gradually it merged with the concept or belief that a bokor or shaman can revive dead people through secret potions or magic and make them his slaves. In fact, the zombie is the logical result of being a slave: without will, without name and trapped in a work that has no end.
The northern imperial nations became obsessed with voodoo in Haiti for good reason. The conditions in the French colony were very deplorable, The death rate among slaves was so high that they eventually rebelled from their masters and they started a revolution in 1791.
After several years, finally In 1804 they became the first independent black republic. Since then it was demonized as a violent place, full of superstitions and death, because its mere existence was an offense to European countries.
Throughout the 19th century, reports of cannibalism, human sacrifice and dangerous mystical rites were constant. It wasn’t until the 20th century, after the U.S. occupied Haiti in 1915, that those stories began to coalesce around the word “zombie.”
US Military Tried to Destroy Voodoo Beliefs, but the only thing they managed to do was strengthen their roots even more. It makes a lot of sense that the movie The white zombie appeared in 1932, shortly before the US occupation of Haiti ended in 1934: Americans went to “modernize” a country they considered backward, but instead, they returned with a “primitive” superstition.
Popular magazines were filled with stories of dead people full of desire for revenge, who came out of their graves and pursued their perpetrators. Those who were once formless ghosts took on the physical form of decomposing bodies emerging from Haitian cemeteries. However, it was not these popular magazines that brought zombies to the heights of supernatural stories in the US.
Two writers in the late 1920s not only traveled to Haiti, but sensationally noted that they had seen real zombies. It was not only a fantasy Gothic story: zombies, they said, really existedOne of them was the journalist and oculist William Seabrook who traveled to Haiti in 1927 and wrote “The Magic Island” in 1927.
Seabrook had become known for his stories about Saudi Arabia and West Africa. In Haiti he soon had the opportunity to have contact with voodoo and noted that he had been possessed by the gods.
In a chapter of his book, called The dead men who work in the cane fields, When talking about zombies he was taken to a sugar plantation where he was introduced to the “zombies.” who worked at night. “The eyes were the worst. In truth, they were like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but fixed, unfocused, without seeing,” one can read in part of the chapter.
Seabrook relates that he felt panic, momentarily, because suddenly all the superstitions I had heard became true. But, she soon came across a rational explanation: “They were nothing more than poor, ordinary human beings who were forced to work there.”
This chapter was the basis of the movie The white zombie. And Seabrook has always been credited with introducing these types of stories into US popular culture.
The other writer who was part of this introduction to the zombie genre is Zora Neale Hurston. Many writers who were part of the call Harlem Renaissance In the 1920s and 1930s they were interested in Haiti, its black independence process, and campaigned against the US invasion.
However, Hurston was more conservative and thought the occupation was a good thing. Despite her beliefs, hShe had studied anthropology and was sent to New Orleans to study hoodoo. (an African-American version of voodoo).
Over there tried to become a voodoo priestess and his stories speak of the most impressive moments of his contact with this belief, although his anthropological notes lack, at times, academic support.
Then, in his informal travel book about Haiti, Tell My Horse (1937), Hurston not only tells us that zombies exist, but that “I had the rare opportunity of seeing and touching an authentic case. I heard the breathy noises in his throat. And then I did what no one else had done: I photographed it”.
The image of Felicia Félix-Mentor, whom Hurston calls a “real-life” zombie, is truly disturbing. Shortly after this meeting, Hurston left Haiti suddenly because she believed secret voodoo societies were trying to poison her..
If Hurston encountered a zombie in Haiti, the poor woman in the image could have been not so much a living dead creature as a person who had suffered a social death, cast out by her community and perhaps suffering from a profound mental illness. (Hurston met her in one of Haiti’s psychiatric hospitals.)
The Walking Dead It also carries the echo of this story. The series rarely made much of the setting where it took place, but several groups of survivors passed through Georgia, through abandoned landscapes that once housed huge slave plantations.
To understand the history of the zombie is to understand the anxieties that this figure still addresses in culture. contemporary American, where race remains a major issue.
*Por Roger Luckhurst
