From Haiti to Hollywood: The American Zombie

2/7/25 Written by: Juneaux

In the modern day, Zombies are well-established in the media. Yes, zombies are everywhere: The Walking Dead, ghouls, cannibal corpses, brain eaters, etc. Did you know the word Zombie originates from the Haitian term Nzambi? The concept of our Hollywood Zombie is deeply rooted in voodoo culture. Zombies are also much more real than we think.

Making a real-life Zombie starts with a delicious snack prepared by a Bokor, a voodoo practitioner. The ingredients include bone powder, a small tree frog, a segmented worm, a new-world toad, and pufferfish. This treat is chock-full of toxins! It causes numbness and even a bit of euphoria, that is before it puts you into a vegetative state. The bokor will then bury the “Zombie,” let them simmer for 8 hours, uproot them, and then feed them a psychoactive compound called Datura Stramonium.

Datura Stramonium

This keeps the “Zombie” in a pliable state, essentially turning the person into a drugged-up slave that's in some sort of constant mental purgatory. A movie that shows a historically accurate Nzambi would be "The Serpent and the Rainbow"(1988).

However, it would be wrong to not mention how the fear of the undead has been deeply embedded in human history for thousands of years and has spanned many cultures. A few examples:

When it comes to films, everybody assumes the first Zombie flick was George Romero’s “Night Of The Living Dead,” but that would be false. "White Zombie" (1932), directed by Victor Halperin and starring Bela Lugosi, was the first movie to set up the idea of Zombies as dead people brought back to life and controlled by voodoo. This film defined the basic parameters of what Zombies were supposed to be at the time.

The next part of The Hollywood Zombie was a film by director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton. “I Walked with a Zombie” (1943) reinforced the supernatural Caribbean aspects of the Zombie. Then, Romero came. “Night of the Living Dead” re-defined the Hollywood Zombie, now feasting on flesh and being fully re-animated. This detached the Hollywood Zombie from the Haitian Nzambi.

Romero also often incorporated social and political commentary into his horror films, such as “Dawn of the Dead” (1978). In the movie, the characters take refuge in a shopping mall while Zombies overrun the world. Romero uses the mall as a metaphor for consumer culture, with the Zombies mindlessly wandering through it, drawing to it in a similar way that consumers are drawn to shopping. The film critiques how people, even after death, continue to consume mindlessly.

The Hollywood Zombie has adapted and been changed. Now, it has crawled into new media. Zombies can be found in popular video games, books, TV shows, and comics. We as a society have turned an old voodoo myth into an industry of guts and cheap jump scares. Somewhere along the way, the Hollywood Zombie lost its roots, traded mysticism for gore, and became another monster to gun down. But maybe that’s the horror. It is easy to strip something of its history, repackage, and resell it. Whether they’re a metaphor for consumerism, a disease, or just an excuse for gnarly kills, one thing’s sure: Zombies aren’t dying out anytime soon.