“Watch me create divinity in this world you have given me that is so ugly and so hard. Watch me become God in front of your eyes.”
— Ira Lowenthal, on Haitian Vodou
How do you make a monster?
Sometimes, I’d like to think, it happens around a fire. Sometimes it happens in the dreary volcanic winter of 19th century Switzerland. Often, monsters are created by superstition and xenophobia; there’s a lot of fear in ignorance.
Frequently it happens in a slow cascade—over a long period of time through stories retold, shaped and reshaped by culture and time. Almost as often we lose the origins, and myth becomes shrouded in the fog of history. Werewolves owe their etymology to some combination of Old English, Old High German and Greek—a shadowy legacy of Greek mythology, Nordic folklore and ancient Mesopotamian poetry. The vampire similarly grew out of millennia of rumor and folklore before finding its most popular form in 18th century Europe.
Sometimes, a monster is made by a director with a film crew and an idea. Sometimes, by a man entrusted with three ships and a royal directive. Sometimes a monster grows in the heart. Sometimes a monster is a weapon.
At this point I am no longer surprised when the answer to a simple question (what is the origin of the zombie?) requires a good deal of historical and political context. And I am no longer surprised when the answers to simple questions are linked inextricably to imperialism and all the forms of racism you can think of—economic, linguistic, personal, structural. Forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but all of this (gestures broadly towards everything) is political.
When asking what is the zombie (and why) the real question is where to start with the answer—because for my money there are two obvious places to begin. The zombie, as you probably already know, can be many things. The reason why is the interesting part.
Let’s start with recent history and move backwards. Time is a flat circle, and it will all come back around.
The Modern Zombie
In the fall of 1968, George A. Romero’s seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead premiered in Pittsburgh’s Fulton Theater, not far from where the movie was filmed. It was then released nationwide—dumped unceremoniously, along with other horror films of the time, into the Saturday matinée time slot.
Its 35mm assault on unsuspecting audiences preceded the implementation of the MPAA’s ratings guide by one month, meaning that its audiences were (at first) largely comprised of children and teens. Roger Ebert famously wrote a non-review of the experience, chronicling an audience’s stupefied transition from delighted screams to dismayed silence (and some quiet crying). At the time, a ticket cost ¢40.
The black and white film stunned young audiences, inspired a generation of future horror storytellers, and generally won over critics on its way toward earning roughly 250 times its $114,000 budget. It remains one of the most successful and influential indie horror movies of all time.
You can draw a straight line (or perhaps a shambling, anfractuous one) from that auspicious debut to the summer of 2021, when the hugely successful series The Walking Dead kicked off its 11th and final season. The comic adaptation attracted more than 17 million viewers at the height of its popularity, making it a history-making cable program.
Viewership has eroded over time, but the show’s cultural impact is undeniably massive. In addition to current off-shoots Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: World Beyond, more spin-offs (and a Rick Grimes-centered movie trilogy) are all in the pipeline.
This is all to say that zombies are now, 53 years after Romero’s indie paradigm, firmly entrenched in mainstream pop culture (helped in part by a highly influential copyright gaff). They are no longer confined to an obscure corner of geeky counterculture; they have been commodified, parodied and accepted into the general consciousness as an instantly recognizable boogeyman, an adaptable metaphor, an entry point for amateur filmmakers, and the subject of numerous multi-million dollar properties.
But the zombie didn’t start with Romero (that word is never used in his influential debut), and neither did this piece on its origins. The inception of this essay began, like so many others, with a simple question (and a complicated answer): where do zombies come from? Where and when was the zombie born?
Inspired by a first-time viewing of Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (itself a response to the success of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead), I asked: how are the Caribbean undead of that opportunistic 1979 cult hit related to the ravenous ghouls of Romero’s oeuvre? How do you make a monster (and what does it tell us about ourselves)?
To answer that question, we must go back further.
The Haitian Zombie
If you went to elementary school in the United States sometime in the last half century, you probably remember the famous opening line of the poem “In 1492” by Jean Marzollo: “In fourteen hundred ninety-two / Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” This simple rhyme often kicks off our education in American history, and the poem is a fitting representation of what generally follows: a bright and simplistic version of events (written, to be fair, when the author was 7 years old) that erases genocide, slavery and brutal violence by avaricious imperial forces.
Another less-cited line goes, “The Arakawa natives were very nice; / they gave the sailors food and spice.” While this charming turn of phrase would seem to accurately represent the initial response of the Native peoples to European explorers, the poem conveniently omits the less sunny flip side. An unwritten line about the colonizers could very well read, “Since theirs was the apostolic way / They vowed to murder twelve a day.”
Christopher Columbus’ first arrival in the Caribbean was a harbinger for future holocaust, and a death sentence for the vast majority of the many thousands (or, according to some estimates, millions) of Native Taíno/Arawak people of Hispaniola. Even the name Hispaniola (still in use today) is a derivation of the colonialist rebranding of La Española (Little Spain). The lack of written history among the Native civilization means that we can only posit that the precolonial name was some version or combination of Quisqueya/Quizquella/Haïti/Ayiti.
An overarching point that I wish to drive home is that thousands of years of functioning civilization was violently disrupted by Columbus’ “discovery” of the island, which he mistook for India. Seldom have quotations bore so much tragic weight.
Once established in Hispaniola, world powers Spain and France did everything they could to suck their colonies dry, enslaving the people of the Indigenous kingdoms to export gold, copper, coffee, sugar cane, indigo, and cocoa. When the brutal conditions and targeted violence of the colonizers decimated the Taíno population (wiping out roughly 95-99% of the Native populace), African slaves were imported by the tens of thousands. Half would die within a “few years,” and many thousands more chose suicide.
In 1697, the costly Nine Years’ War was officially ended in the Dutch city of Rijswijk, and Spain ceded the western side of Hispaniola to the French (who dubbed it Saint-Domingue). This division remains today, with Haiti to the west and the Dominican Republic to the east. These nations have since earned their independence (in 1804 and 1844, respectively) but the specter of slavery and economic instability still haunts the island.
It’s important to note that this enslavement was sanctioned by the Catholic Church; the rape and murder of both Taíno Natives and West African slaves was rationalized as the religious duty of Catholic conversion—a spiritual excuse for genocide and exploitation.
For the French, this religious imperative was codified in 1685 by King Louis XIV with the infamous Code Noir: a sweepingly anti-Black and antisemitic decree that mandated the conversion of all slaves to the Roman Catholic Church, as well as laying out rules for the religion, freedom, punishment and sexual relations of slaves, Jews, and free people of color.
In defiance of the Code Noir, the enslaved peoples of West and Central Africa staved off cultural annihilation by practicing their varied religions during precious moments of individual liberty, out of sight of slave masters and government officials. Cut off from the land and familial connections that informed their traditional religions, they forged something new and surely unforeseen: Haitian Vodou, a diasporic African religion whose iconography hid in plain sight by repurposing the saints of the Catholic Church.
This new syncretic religion combined different aspects of Roman Catholicism, Freemasonry, and various West and Central African religions, and its veneration of both Bondyé (the supreme creator) and the lwa (intermediary spirits also known as loa) blurs the line between monotheism and polytheism.
Haitian Vodou does not demarcate morality in the same way as Christianity, and it’s not governed by a strictly rule-based set of ethics. Its morality is more malleable, more practical, and more context-dependent.
Vodou was created as nothing less than a means of survival in the face of catastrophic hardship. It doesn’t have the luxury of a distinct moral binary, removed from the practical realities of a besieged life. It makes sense that a religion born out of slavery and abuse would treat survival as a “high ethic” in itself.
The origins of Vodou are as complex as its historical evolution and ongoing practice, and the religion has always been plagued with sensationally racist misconceptions that deeply misunderstand (or purposefully misconstrue) the reality of the ethos and its participants. As Darmon Richter explains, Haitian Vodou is impossible to describe in a sentence. It is “a way of being in the world.”
Vodou is movement and ritual, music and dance. It is a way of reclaiming personhood, and finding glory in the physical and the spiritual. Vodou is radical freedom, in defiance of White Christian slavery. It is intrinsically revolutionary (and revolution was brewing).
If you’re wondering where the zombies are, don’t worry: they’re coming.
To that point, it must be understood that Vodouists believe in the eternal soul (espri), divided in two parts: the ti bònanj (“little good angel”) and the gwo bònanje (“big good angel”). The philosophical understanding of death varies somewhat depending on region, but there is widespread belief in the afterlife—a separation of the souls, from each other as well as their corresponding lwa.
Considering the historical backdrop, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that death is not something to be feared in Haitian Vodou. For the captured peoples who invented it, death was an escape—not so much an ending as a transference to something new—a relief from unbelievable suffering.
While Western pop culture has inaccurately amplified the negative connotations associated with Vodou, there is indeed a dark side. The malevolent subversion of Vodou’s priests and priestesses (oungans and manbos, respectively) are the bokor: practitioners of Vodou that serve with “both hands”—that is, for good or evil.
After physical death, a person’s ti bònanj is in a vulnerable state, and belief in the zombie stems from the possibility of the soul’s capture by an ill-meaning bokor. Such an act effectively creates two zombies: one of the spirit (hidden away in a secret place) and one of the flesh, captured and left to wander (or serve) in a corporeal purgatory. Trapped in this state, these poor souls are subject to the whims of the controlling bokor, until (or if) they are freed.
If the only escape from enslavement is the promise of a new type of existence after death, then the zombie is the ultimate horror. For cruel and opportunistic slaveholders, the zombie was a deterrent against mass suicide (and lost profits). It is no wonder that Vodouists do not fear death, or the zombie itself: they fear becoming one.
Revolution
Despite all the best efforts of imperial powers, rebellion was looming—and Vodou was helping it along.
Anthony Bogues of Brown University explains how Vodou’s lack of a central text makes it inaccessible to the slave master; not only did it provide a means for humanization, but it became a method for cultural empowerment and political insurgency.
The Haitian slave revolt of 1791 was not the first of its kind, but it proved to be the most successful. By 1804, French occupation had been broken and Saint-Domingue was renamed Haiti: the first independent Black nation in the world.
“The best thing that ever happened to racism is Vodou.”
—IRA LOWENTHAL
The Haitian Revolution is worthy of lifetimes worth of scholarship, and it cost hundreds of thousands of lives over the course of many years. The scale and longevity of the violence involved in its history is staggering. I am of course just touching on the most essential points, but if you want to learn more you could start with these excellent articles by BlackPast and History Cooperative.
In the years following Haitian independence, emigration carried Vodou outside of Haiti. It found yet a new form in Louisiana, where it has withstood ideological and municipal attacks by those who fear the extraordinary power of Black fellowship.
Hollywood Appropriation
But what, if anything, does any of this have to do with Night of the Living Dead?
After all, it was not the intent of George Romero or John Russo to hijack Haitian religious culture with their 1968 indie hit. The word zombie wasn’t used in relation to the film until an article in the French publication Cahiers du Cinema, which had the dual effect of shifting the conversation while legitimizing the artistry of a film previously considered a successful-but-niche splatter flick.
When asked about the seemingly incidental link between the two creatures, Romero rightly deferred to those “Caribbean boys” and their “voodoo,” because Hollywood had already spent some years sensationalizing (mostly inaccurately) the somnambulist zombie of the Antilles.
This began most prominently with the film White Zombie in 1932, which is only really interested in the Haitian Vodou source material insofar as it affects its White characters (hence the title). It stars Bela Lugosi as an enigmatic “witch doctor” who entrances a young White woman at the request of a jealous suitor, while the Native slaves amount to little more than set dressing. The film tells on itself with the cumbersome (but surprisingly honest) tagline: “They knew this fiend was practicing zombiism on the Natives, but when he tried it on a white girl the nation revolted!”
In the 1943 film I Walked With a Zombie, a White Canadian nurse travels to Saint Sebastian to care for the wife of a plantation owner. Upon arriving, she responds to her Black driver’s anecdote about his ancestors’ enslavement with, “Well they brought you to a beautiful place, didn’t they?” Tourneur’s film depicts Vodou and Haitian culture with a touch more subtlety than the typical exploitation film, but its story is still unfailingly Anglocentric.
Hammer Films took a stab at the mythology in their 1966 feature The Plague of the Zombies, which plucked the zombie from its origins and placed it in a quiet village in Cornwall. It has enjoyed a modest legacy in Hammer’s storied library of sensationalist horror films, but it predictably white-washes the inspiration for its conceit while Other-izing its enslaved Black extras (who do not factor into the story in any meaningful way).
As the legacy of Night of the Living Dead gradually cemented, Romero shrugged his shoulders and accepted this repurposed moniker (and his eventual title as King of the Zombies). At least in terms of popular culture, one kind of zombie ate another, and the zombies of Haitian Vodou became a historical footnote on the entry of this new monster.
Language as Empire
Prescriptivism that is too brittle will crack against the inherent fluidity of language. I am not arguing that words should not be allowed to change, but there is a sobering aptness about the way that the new zombie subsumed the old one.
The French and Spanish enslavement of African peoples was monstrous, but the linguistic appropriation of the zombie was mundane. Imperialism indirectly created the zombie and then casually plucked the word from its roots, and I am struck by the banality of the confiscation. This is, after all, how language evolves.
But zombie isn’t a loanword or even a cognate, and its usage to describe Romero’s ghouls (swiped, ironically, by the French) divorces it from its origins and rewrites the meaning. Compared to the actual enslavement and exploitation of humans it is of course a small theft, but the intellectual exploration of the context is worthwhile in itself.
Just because linguistic imperialism isn’t viscerally violent doesn’t mean it is in any way harmless. Language is culture (and vice versa), and our words matter. The colonial naming of Hispaniola was itself the first part of a “semiotic power grab,” and it is part of the same machine that physically eradicates whole groups of people. Linguicide occurs in parallel with genocide, and Western culture has a long history of using language and writing as a means of erasure of Native culture (see: Native American genocide and forced assimilation).
The choice by scholars (and, after pressure, the Library of Congress) to move away from the spelling of “voodoo” is a conscious one—and it doesn’t serve only to differentiate from Louisiana Voodoo. Kate Ramsay’s book “The Spirits and The Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti” explains how the spelling “voodoo” is not only less technically correct etymylogically, but that the world outside of Haiti has tainted it with inaccurate and racist connotations of sorcery and devil worship. Televangelist and human colostomy bag Pat Robertson famously called the disastrous 2010 Haiti earthquake a “blessing in disguise,” and the direct result of a curse brought about by Haitians’ “pact with the devil,” in exchange for independence from the French.
It’s counterproductive to give these attacks the benefit of the doubt: this straw man version of Vodou has deep roots in White Supremacy and religiously mandated colonialism, and those roots have grown into a disturbingly sturdy neocolonialist tree, casting a long shadow over modern Haiti.
Anthropologist Ira Lowenthal posits that all this reactionary fear is a direct response to Vodou’s role in the emancipation of Haiti: “[Vodou] is an unbreakable revolutionary spirit threatening to inspire other black Caribbean republics—or, God forbid, the United States itself.”
This is a convenient segue into US complicity in Haiti’s fraught post-colonial history, one that didn’t escape imperialism so much as it transitioned from one kind to another. In the midst of the Haitian Revolution, President Thomas Jefferson (who owned roughly 600 slaves in his lifetime) took a break from noisily glorifying freedom and equality t0 equate Haitians’ desire for emancipation to a “disease”—one that should be confined to the island.
White slaveholders in the US were deeply disturbed by the success of a Black slave revolution in the Caribbean, and feared similar uprisings at home. One such revolt in Louisiana was violently suppressed, and Jefferson refused to acknowledge Haitian independence for fear of further heightening racial tensions in the US.
The demonization of Haitian Vodou was amplified tremendously by the US military occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934, a period of martial law marked by racial segregation, forced labor, religious persecution and torture. The US and other world powers went to great effort to economically sabotage the burgeoning state as an excuse to assert control (and promptly rob it blind)—their subsequent cultural attacks on Haiti’s “ungovernable” Blackness is the height of evil hypocrisy.
There is a vicious absurdity in the fact that Haitians had to pay for their independence not just with incalculable human hardship and loss of life, but with a 150 million franc reparation bill from the French, “for their lost revenues from slavery.” Historian Marlene Daut has called it “the greatest heist in history,” and Haiti is still dealing with the fallout.
Haiti may have earned its independence in 1804, but at no point in the ensuing centuries has it been free from the grossly opportunistic attacks of imperialist world powers. The Biden administration’s recent deportation of thousands of asylum-seeking Haitian refugees is just another action in a long tradition of political callousness, with no sense of responsibility or compassion for past crimes or shared history between the two countries.
The Power of Genre
No one reading this personally took part in the genocide or colonization of Native cultures, but as autonomous members of a political and globalized world (and some of us descendants of slaveholders) we bear some responsibility to educate ourselves on the legacy and fallout of colonialism—the effects of which shaped (and continue to influence) modern society.
When I say “we” in this context I am putting the onus especially on White people (such as myself), who benefit from White Supremacy whether we support it or not. If this seems unfair, consider this tweet by Nicole Hannah Jones:
This is the American burden, and that of any culturally dominant demographic in any world power across the globe: of acknowledging past crimes, of owning responsibility, of attempting to make things right. Reparations are merely a starting point, and racial education an absolute necessity.
As the cachet and profitability of horror grows, so does its capacity for meaningful cultural influence. Horror movies don’t need to be political or intersectional, but they often are and always have been—by accident or design.
There is a world of difference between Haitian zombies and Romero’s shambling undead, but it’s no great surprise that digging into the story of either means having hard conversations about race and representation.
On the evening of April 4, 1968, Romero and Russo threw the completed reels of Night of the Living Dead into the trunk of a car and drove them to New York. Roughly 650 miles away in Memphis, TN, James Earl Ray shot and killed Martin Luther King, Jr. The proximity of these events to each other is incidental, but the fateful coincidence has helped underscore the film’s racial subtext. Even low budget horror films reflect the world around them, and it’s hard to find an article about the film that doesn’t at least acknowledge its political undertones.
Romero claims to have hired Black actor Duane Jones as the lead in his film simply because he was the best man for the job, and I appreciate the decency of this attitude. But regardless of intention, the choice was a transgressive one in 1968 as the United States grappled with a surging civil rights movement and a heinously misguided Vietnam war. Art is not made in a void.
In a way it doesn’t matter whether or not Romero and Russo had politics on their minds when writing the script: the purposefulness of the film’s politics has become ancillary to its substantial legacy as a gory satire of a nation in turmoil. It is partly for this reason that the film is sometimes referred to as the “first modern horror movie”; it certainly didn’t invent social satire, but the scary world it reflects is a decidedly modern one.
From Seed to Fruit
I have been careful not to slip into the past tense when describing the racial realities embedded in the story of the zombie (both Haitian and contemporary), because the prevailing issues have only continued to evolve. Individual racism has become less acceptable even since 1968, but the structures that hold up racial hierarchies are still intact.
Haiti continues to grapple with political corruption, modern slavery, external destabilization and misguided Christian evangelism. Their social and physical infrastructure has been further imperiled by climate disaster, and the island is a microcosm of an unfair truth: those countries least responsible for global warming are the most vulnerable to its disastrous consequences.
The United States has still so far refused to amend or even acknowledge its deep-rooted racism, despite a multitude of avoidable tragedies that underscore the point. The cultural and legislative clash over Critical Race Theory isn’t a debate over systemic racism so much as it is a calculated misinformation campaign meant to frighten and galvanize White folks who want to keep their country anti-Black—the way it always has been. Make America Great Again is a not-so-subtle campaign for this very goal.
The actions (and subsequent acquittal) of murderers like George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse don’t happen without White supremacy. Phenomena such as mass incarceration, segregation, police brutality and racial wealth gaps don’t exist without the help of structural racism. Bills like Texas’ HB 3979 and Oklahoma’s performative HB 1775 (which seek to white-wash American history while discouraging political engagement) are a reminder that the status quo in America was built upon the slavery and disenfranchisement of Black people, a reality that exists in precipitous and hypocritical opposition to espoused values of freedom and equality.
We are still the country depicted in the final scene of Night of the Living Dead, when a Black hero is offhandedly slayed by a group of armed yokels. We are still the country that demonizes Vodou even as Haitians strive to exist in a world created by imperialism and neoliberal exploitation—a world that we helped build. Horror never stops being a mirror (and in this case, a history lesson).
The Bright Side
The story of the zombie is indeed a frightening one, but it isn’t hopeless.
The United States is becoming less White and less Christian by the day, and this unstoppable demographic shift will continue to shake the foundations of a country whose debilitating identity crisis can be traced back to its formation. The racism embedded in the architecture of our country has been forced out into the open, and a host of civil rights activists have picked up the baton passed by the likes of John Lewis and Dorothy Height and A. Philip Randolph. Imperialism breeds monsters, but history teaches us that heroes always rise up to fight them.
The fate of the United States may depend on the will of regular people to do the heroic thing in the face of institutional oppression and reactionary fascism, and this very much includes the “Nice White people” who have long benefited from their place in the false hierarchy.
Fatalism is itself a zombie, and there is beauty in the struggle for justice. After all, that’s what Vodou is: an act of revolutionary joy that finds sublimity in the human experience. It’s a shame to fixate on the historical crimes against Haiti without acknowledging the unlikely good that came out of it—that is, astonishing resilience and beauty, persisting in the face of evil. As Lowenthal puts it: “The best thing that ever happened to racism is Vodou.”
The world outside of Haiti would foist upon it tragedy after tragedy and then discredit the dazzling, unlikely good that comes out of it. I would beg us not to do that.
The origin of the zombie is not shrouded in the fog of legend, as is the case with so many monsters. It is right there in our history, connected to the best and worst parts of us. Maybe this is why, even after so many permutations, the zombie remains such an indispensable symbol.
Whether the zombie is the work of a Haitian bokor or a mad scientist or a new virus, the metaphor remains: the zombie is a void—a soulless husk of insatiable hunger. It is a negative space, defined by its boundaries. That is where we exist: on the boundary between life and whatever comes next, trying to find comfort in a world filled with monsters. One of those many monsters (we learn over and over) is the devouring imperialist—the zombie is just his appetite.