In 1968, director and screenwriter George A. Romero released a film made on a shoestring budget and shot guerrilla-style with the help of his team.
“Night of the Living Dead” only played in a handful of small theaters in Pittsburgh, but it made such an impression on viewers that it slowly spread, first across the country and then throughout the world.
Like a zombie outbreak, Romero’s film ended up grossing $30 million, multiplying its budget by 300. The financial success was significant, but the social impact was even greater. That film redefined the zombie archetype in popular culture.
Today, almost sixty years later, zombies are more popular than ever. Films like “Shaun of the Dead,” “World War Z,” and “Train to Busan” have propelled zombies into the mainstream.
And beyond cinema, series like “The Walking Dead” and games like “Dying Light” or “Plants vs. Zombies” have kept the undead alive in popular culture. Today, the zombie is arguably more popular than other classic monsters like vampires, mummies, or werewolves.
This is no coincidence. The social commentary that Romero embedded in his 1968 film, released during a time of deep social upheaval in the United States, continues to resonate to this day.
But to truly understand this myth, we have to go much further back to where the legend of the walking dead truly began.
After all, zombies are creatures of legend, aren’t they?
Slaves in Life and in Death
Haiti is a Caribbean nation on the island of Hispaniola. In fact, the island is split in two: one half is Haiti, and the other is the Dominican Republic.
Although the two nations share a border, their differences are stark.
The Dominican Republic has become a popular tourist destination for both Europeans and Americans. Haiti, on the other hand, is the poorest country in the region and has endured decades of political instability, making it a failed state in many respects.
Originally under Spanish rule, Haiti came under French control in the eighteenth century. The French brought thousands of African slaves to the island, displacing the native Taíno people.
These enslaved Africans worked from dawn to dusk on the plantations, under brutal conditions imposed by their French masters. However, they managed to preserve many of their spiritual traditions, including Vodou.
Vodou played a crucial role in uniting the enslaved population of African descent, who staged a revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. They overthrew the colonial regime and made Haiti one of the first independent republics in the Americas.
Within Vodou exists the figure of the bokor, a sorcerer who can use dark magic to cast a wide range of spells, from curses to love charms.
This figure is central to the zombie myth: corpses resurrected by the bokor to serve as mindless slaves, fully under the sorcerer’s control.
Various rituals exist to achieve this power, and even distinctions between corporeal zombies (the most common) and non-corporeal zombies, which resemble ghosts in Western tradition.
This is because, like many animist religions, Vodou is based on the duality of body and soul, with two types of spirits said to inhabit every person.
Zombies Invade the United States — and the World
From a strictly skeptical perspective, these rites are seen as a matter of suggestion and belief.
The fear of becoming a zombie, of never finding peace even in death, is profoundly powerful. It serves as a social mechanism to keep communities who follow this belief system under tight control.
This was evident in Haiti and other Caribbean islands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During this same period, slaves were also brought to the United States, particularly to work on southern plantations. With them came their rituals.
Vodou spread from New Orleans throughout the American South. These Afro-Caribbean practices were both feared and romanticized, often seen as exotic and mysterious by Americans.
In the 1920s, a number of books and essays appeared about Haiti’s customs and legends.
In 1932, more than three decades before Romero’s film, “White Zombie” premiered. It was one of the first major films centered on the figure of the living dead.
The film portrayed a highly distorted and sensationalized version of Haitian rituals, contributing to a negative stereotype of the island.
This was no accident. At the time, the U.S. government had been involved in Haiti for several years, effectively controlling the country’s leadership.
The zombie myth has always been linked to the legacy of slavery. The figure emerged in a Haiti filled with hundreds of thousands of African slaves who were searching for a way to cope with their fear and misery.
“White Zombie” stripped the figure of its social context, turning the zombie into nothing more than a mindless horror monster.
But Romero would later reverse that narrative. In a time of hypercapitalism, his zombies became symbols of consumerism, creatures driven by instinct to devour: flesh, brains — anything.
This concept has endured in the decades since, with powerful examples like Zack Snyder’s remake of “Dawn of the Dead”, which takes place inside a shopping mall, a monument to endless consumption.
Today, it seems the zombie craze has taken over the world but left Haiti behind.
A nation with immense potential, Haiti has been devastated by human greed and natural disasters, from a massive earthquake to a cholera outbreak in recent years.
Haiti, as it stands today, is almost a walking corpse, governed, perhaps, not by bokors, but by other dark forces far removed from its original beliefs.
