Zombies - reanimated corpses with an irresistible craving for human flesh, especially the brain, actively invade modern culture like never before. For staggering, slow-moving monsters, zombies have become a major force in the entertainment industry over the past decade.
Although George Romero's 1968 film "Night of the Living Dead" is often considered the first modern zombie film, the first film was actually released 40 years earlier, it was called "White Zombie", starring Bela Lugosi (Béla Lugosi), who played an evil Haitian voodoo priest who "zombified" a beautiful young woman.
In the years that followed, few zombie films returned to their Haitian origins. The most significant of these is The Snake and the Rainbow.
The word "zombie" itself first appeared around 1810 when the English historian Robert Southey mentioned it in his History of Brazil. However, his "zombie" was not a brain-devouring monster, it was a West African deity.
The word later came to mean an important human power without a bodily shell, and ultimately, a zombie came to mean a human being who lacks consciousness, mind and soul. It was "imported" to Haiti and elsewhere from Africa through the slave trade.
Voodoo or Science?
Everyone knows that zombies are fictional characters, but few are aware of the facts about these creatures. For many people, especially those living in Haiti, zombies are quite real. This is not a joke, this is something to be taken seriously. Beliefs in magic and witchcraft are widespread throughout Haiti and the Caribbean, often in the form of religions such as Voodoo and Santeria.
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Haitian zombies are believed to have been humans raised from the dead (and sometimes manipulated) by the magical means of voodoo priests. Sometimes zombies were carried out as a punishment (many in Haiti are afraid of this, as they believe that they can be used even after death), but often zombies are said to be used as slaves on farms and sugarcane plantations.
In 1980, a mentally ill man even claimed to have been in captivity as a zombie worker for 20 years, although he never brought researchers to his place of work and was unable to reveal what exactly he did.
For decades, Western scientists have treated zombies somewhat differently than just fictional movie monsters. In the 1980s, a scientist named Wade Davis claimed to have found a powder with which to create zombies, thus providing a scientific basis for zombie stories.
Davis did not believe in voodoo magic, however, he believed that he had found something that could lead a person into a zombie-like state: a powerful neurotoxin (tetrodotoxin) that is found in the body of some animals, including the puffer fish. He claimed to have penetrated several secret societies of voodoo priests and was able to obtain several samples of the powder that turns people into zombies, after which he conducted a chemical analysis of the resulting.
Davis wrote a book on the subject called The Serpent and the Rainbow, which later became a horror film. For a while, Davis was a very popular person, because he explained who zombies are from a scientific point of view! However, all of Davis's conclusions and thoughts were later challenged by skeptical scientists who considered his methods unscientific, indicating that the samples of the powder he provided were contradictory and that the amount of neurotoxin contained in these samples was not high enough. to turn a person into a zombie.
In addition, the doses used by priests from the secret voodoo societies must be very precise, because too much poison can easily kill a person. Others noted that no one had ever found any plantations in this small island country that were supposed to be filled with zombies.
In his second book, The Passing of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombies, Davis admitted that some of his theories had no right to exist and refuted the most sensational claims made against him. Nevertheless, he insisted that the Haitians' belief in zombies can be based on real events (albeit in rare cases), when a person was poisoned with tetrodotoxin, put him in a coffin, from which after a while he came out, “waking up”.
Moreover, he added, the zombie phenomenon was much more than just a special powder, it was an essential part of a deep-rooted sociocultural belief in the power of witchcraft. In Haitian culture, voodoo priests did much more than just create zombies, they brought both blessings and curses through magic.
Thus, the stories of the real life of Haitian zombies arose as corpses rising from the graves and disappeared as zombies killed by a shot in the head. While zombies remain a myth in real life, there are more than enough feature films to satisfy the vast majority of zombies for centuries to come.
Balandina E. A.