Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (3 page)

Known as the Cemetery Zombie, actor Bill Hinzman played the first-ever modern zombie to appear anywhere when he lurched on the screen in the opening moments of
Night of the Living Dead.
As part of George Romero’s core production team on that film, his name will forever be linked to the iconic monster he helped bring to life.

Hinzman worked behind the camera with Romero on future projects before writing, directing, and starring in a lackluster rip-off of
Night
called
FleshEater
in 1988.

ILLUSTRATION BY JOSH TAYLOR

R
omero didn’t think the flesh eaters he created were zombies because prior to
Night of the Living Dead
the world only knew zombies to be soulless slaves of the Haitian voodoo tradition, magically brought back from the dead to do the bidding of their masters, usually as menial labor. In fact, other than their shared name, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombie.

Unlike actual corpses rising from the grave, voodoo zombies are induced through a mixture of drugs, religious ritual, cultural belief, and spiritual possession. After being put into a trancelike state that approximates a coma, victims awaken and are told that their souls have been taken from their bodies. Then, to keep them under control, they are regularly fed the hallucinogenic drug datura, also known as the “zombie cucumber.”

Wade Davis is a world-renowned anthropologist best known for his 1985 book
The Serpent and the Rainbow
, which explores the zombie traditions of Haitian voodoo. The book was made into a movie of the same name in 1988 that took great liberties with the original text. Saying that Davis hated the adaptation is an understatement. He’s gone as far as to declare it to be the worst movie ever made in the history of Hollywood. Davis isn’t right about that.
Serpent
isn’t even the worst movie of 1988. If you have any doubts, pick up a copy
of
Mac and Me
, a shameless knockoff of
E.T.
featuring an extended dance montage in a McDonald’s parking lot.

I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Wade Davis, because he, like George Romero, understands that the flesh eaters of
Night of the Living Dead
should never have been called zombies in the first place:

The zombies in movies like
Night of the Living Dead
have no connection at all to the zombie of Haiti. It is not a correct or fair use of that word.
3

Davis knows what he’s talking about. He earned a PhD from Harvard, was the 2009 recipient of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s Gold Medal, and has been a featured speaker at the TED Conference, where geniuses and world leaders go to shape the future of our planet. At the same time, he’s spent the last thirty years explaining that voodoo zombies don’t want to eat your brains. It’s got to be a little frustrating.

But Davis has an unassailable point. From a dramatic standpoint, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombie. From a factual, anthropological, religious, or historic standpoint, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombie. It’s as misguided as asserting that the protective cup that athletes stuff in their jocks when playing contact sports is closely related to a coffee cup because they share the same name. And then using that as justification to include the athletic cup in an academic study of the history of the Peruvian coffee bean.

In the 1960s, zombies were not on the popular-culture radar. Two notable books were published about Hollywood film
monsters that decade, and neither even mentioned zombies.
A Pictorial History of Hollywood Film Monsters
and
Master Movie Monsters
feature mummies, vampires, aliens, werewolves, and even mad scientists, but zombies don’t get a single word of coverage. Zombies were omitted not because they weren’t getting the respect they deserved but, rather, because
Night of the Living Dead
hadn’t yet been made.

Haitian zombies were known in anthropological circles, but they certainly weren’t considered a bankable film subgenre. The few voodoo zombies on-screen in the 1930s and 1940s were not inherently dangerous and took aggressive action only when instructed to do so by their masters. In fact, they were so docile and fundamentally good that they often turned on those same masters when ordered to do something particularly nefarious. They could even, as Wade Davis explores in
The Serpent and the Rainbow
, talk about their memories and experiences with pathos and recognize themselves as individuals participating in their community’s culture.

Even in Hollywood versions of Haitian voodoo zombie stories, zombies weren’t scary. In the 1932 film
White Zombie
, they’re described as “corpses taken from their graves and made to work in sugar mills and the fields at night.” That is what they were in the movies before
Night of the Living Dead
, and that is how they are still perceived in Haiti today.

Of all the differences between voodoo zombies of the Afro-Haitian tradition and the modern zombie as first realized by George Romero, none is more striking or more overlooked than the fact that voodoo zombies are not dead. Let me repeat: voodoo zombies are not dead. They are as alive as you or I but operate under the strong religious or substance-induced belief that they have been brought back from the dead to serve a living master.

Webster University professor emeritus Bob Corbett has studied Haitian culture for decades and personally traveled to Haiti more than fifty times over the past fifteen years to investigate its people and traditions. He writes:

Eating the zombie cucumber keeps them in their zonkedout state, but otherwise they are just like animals in a pen and will do what they are told to do. Mainly they’re used as slave labor.

In our correspondence, Corbett went on to emphasize that voodoo zombies have beating hearts and normal blood flow and body temperature. They need to sleep, eat regular foods, and eliminate waste like the rest of us, and they are not contagious or aggressive.

There are people in Haiti today who believe that they have been transformed into zombies, but they still retain the same rights as any other citizen. If a zombie is killed or its death is caused through the neglect of another, the offender is put on trial for murder. As I said, voodoo zombies aren’t dead. They are also not aggressive, nor created by a biological infection. The lack of connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombie cannot be overstated.

T
he modern zombie first appeared in
Night of the Living Dead
in 1968. Made on a shoestring budget with borrowed cars and part-time actors,
Night
tells the story of a group of strangers trapped in an isolated farmhouse while roaming zombies try to break through their hasty defenses and eat them.

As the film opens, two siblings, Johnny and Barbra, arrive at a remote cemetery to visit their long-dead father’s grave. Johnny realizes that Barbra is as spooked to be there as she was when they were kids. He teases her, pointing to an old man wandering across the grass and playing into her fright by suggesting that the guy is an attacker. The joke is on Johnny, though. The wanderer is actually a risen flesh eater bearing down on them. Johnny will be dead just seconds after his naively prophetic words.

Night
brought in an estimated $42 million worldwide. When adjusted for inflation, George Romero’s tiny independent film grossed the equivalent of nearly $265 million in today’s dollars. That’s more than double the box-office numbers of 2009’s smash hit zombie comedy
Zombieland
, prompting one critic to exclaim that the film had been given a license to print money.
4

Despite its mass appeal, critics were slow to come around, but eventually the groundbreaking nature of Romero’s horror masterpiece couldn’t be ignored.
New York Times
reviewer Vincent Canby snidely referred to the film as junk in 1970,
5
but by 2004 the
Times
did an about-face, including
Night of the Living Dead
on a list of top pictures in the history of cinema. Now regarded as one of the most influential films in modern horror,
Night
is among a highly selective collection of pictures archived in the National Film Registry at the United States Library of Congress for its profound cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.

And just how important is the man behind the film? According to award-winning writer-director Quentin Tarantino, George Romero is single-handedly responsible for all the action, gore, and intensity that make modern genre films great.
6
Max Brooks, bestselling author of
Zombie Survival Guide
and
World War Z
, says that when it comes to the modern zombie, it’s Romero’s world, and we’re all just living in it. And John Carpenter, director of such horror classics as
Halloween
(1978) and
The Thing
(1982), simply states that Romero profoundly influenced an entire culture.
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The same year as
Night
’s release, legendary actor Boris Karloff, who played the title character in dozens of monster classics such as
Frankenstein
and
The Mummy
, prophetically observed, “My kind of horror isn’t horror anymore.”
8
He was right.
Night of the Living Dead
had changed things forever.

So where did Romero get his idea for the modern zombie? Jump back to 1953 and Richard Matheson, a young paperback writer with two twenty-five-cent novels to his name. The prestigious Nelson Doubleday Company had just agreed to publish his first hardcover, a work of vampire fiction called
I Am Legend.
Set in contemporary Los Angeles,
Legend
didn’t rehash Old World interpretations of the iconic monsters but instead turned them from elegant loners who lived on the fringes of society into a horde of bloodthirsty ghouls violently driven to suck the last drops of life from every living person on earth.