Zombies: Horror Movie Trope or Grim Reality?

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the world suddenly became a very small and threatening place. South Africa, like the rest of the world, was in lockdown. Eventually, I had to venture outside the gates of our security complex to gather supplies and since I live in a big city, this meant going to a shop. That’s when I saw something I had never seen before and probably will never see again.

An empty street. No cars. No people. Even the homeless had disappeared.

Johannesburg had never been so quiet. It looked like the opening sequence of a zombie movie.

Classic horror movies are popular for a reason. Nothing quite sets the mood for a weekend like a good classic horror with corny dialogue and early special effects. Vampires, werewolves, ghouls, mummies and zombies – we all have our favorite monster. We enjoy the thrill of being scared without actually being in any real danger since we all know that the monsters aren’t real… or are they?

What is a zombie?

The zombie we have today is a very Americanized monster. We’re not entirely sure where the word ‘zombie’ actually comes from. The most likely origin seems to be the Congolese word “nzambi” which means “the spirit of a dead person”. Considering the influence West African practices had on voodoo, this makes a lot of sense, but we’ll get back to voodoo later.

Unlike the vampire or the werewolf, the zombie doesn’t have a clear origin; rather, it’s a bit of a mash-up with all kinds of supernatural beliefs thrown into the mix.

The idea of contagious zombies that spread the zombie disease, usually through a bite, came from the story I Am Legend which is actually a vampire novel, not a zombie story. Ghouls from Arabian folklore like to eat human flesh, and in some stories they can change their shape, taking the shape of the last person they munched on. It’s not quite rising from the dead, but there is definitely some zombie-ideas being born here. Norse draugr are animated corpses brought back to life to guard treasures and valuables. They can be killed a second time, in my experience fireballs are quite effective to kill both the draugr and any companions you might have. They rarely stray too far from the tombs where they bunk, and they supposedly have superhuman strength. Like zombies, the draugr, according to some Icelandic sagas, can also change those they kill into draugr as well, so there is some zombie precedent here. The mummy might also have had some influence on the zombie we know and love today. Mummies are actually real but they only started coming back to life in 1827. Mummies are usually the result of a curse and they don’t eat human flesh but the idea of the dead rising from their graves certainly struck a chord with audiences, introducing the idea of walking corpses causing havoc and mayhem into the mainstream.

These days zombies are usually undead; the corpses of humans reanimated through a virus, a parasite, pollution, radiation or some biological weapon. Whatever made the zombie a zombie in the first place, usually has some human origin cause, let’s be honest, the most likely thing to doom the human race is the human race. The zombies hunger for human flesh, sometimes brains, because, in the case of a virus or parasite, that’s how the zombie passes on the eternal gift of becoming a zombie.

The traditional zombies are slow but relentless, and unlike our human heroes, they don’t need to sleep. In the end, they rely on their numbers, which just keeps growing with every bite they take. More modern zombies are often faster, not necessarily dead to start with, and even show glimmers of intelligence, which makes them even scarier, so it’s really no surprise that they became a standard horror movie addition.

The Horror Movie Trope

William Seabrook, the very problematic travel writer, journalist, occultist and alcoholic, is often considered to be the person to officially introduce the world of zombies to the American audience, and beyond, with his travel book, The Magic Island, published in 1927. It details all Seabrook’s adventures in the exotic Haiti – initiation into voodoo ceremonies and even possession by the voodoo gods. A reliable narrator this man was not.

In one chapter, Seabrook regales the reader with tales of meeting actual zombies working the sugar cane fields of the Haitian-American Sugar Corporation at night. In his description, he stated ‘The eyes were the worst. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing.’ Initially he panicked, but finally decided on a rational explanation, which does seem a little out of character for him – the zombies weren’t the raised dead but simply ordinary, if demented, human beings forced to work in the fields.

Despite his somewhat tenuous grasp on reality, it was this chapter in Seabrook’s book that became the inspiration for the first official feature-length zombie movie in 1932. White Zombie, and the title is the least problematic thing about this movie, tells the story of two star-crossed lovers, Neil and Madeline, who are persuaded to get married on a sugar plantation in Haiti. However, the owner of the plantation is secretly in love with the blushing bride-to-be and employs the services of a voodoo sorcerer to turn Madeline into a zombie. He finally regrets his life choices and proceeds to kill the sorcerer releasing Madeline from his power before falling to his own death. Neil and Madeline are reunited and all’s well that ends well, I suppose. Starring everyone’s favorite villain, Bela Lugosi, the movie was panned by critics but was a financial success. It introduced the concept of zombies to a wide audience, but there was a distinct lack of brain-eating and gore. There were some more zombie movies over the following years but, despite the movie’s limited success, the zombie was nowhere near as popular as Nosferatu or Frankenstein.

The zombie genre would be reinvented by George Romero though not intentionally. In 1968, Romero would scare the pants of people with Night of the Living Dead, which completed changed the zombie trope and cemented the zombie as a vehicle for social commentary, but that’s a discussion for another time. The irony is that Romero never calls his undead creatures zombies; he knew that zombies were actually a Haitian thing. Instead, he refers to them as ghouls. It was the audience who identified the creatures as zombies. The movie itself was loosely based on I am Legend, a vampire novel, not a zombie story, so it really had no business changing the zombie genre as much as it did. Night of the Living Dead was ahead of its time – the main protagonist is a young African-American man which had to have been a tough sell in 1960s America; according to one article, Martin Luther King was assassinated while Romero was loading the movie into the trunk of his car to take it to the distributors. I have no idea how true this is, but King was assassinated in April 1968, so it’s certainly plausible. Despite the sometimes biting racial commentary, the movie was a hit. In order not to zombify our entire audience, I will wrench myself away from delivering a full on academic review of Night of the Living Dead and simply say, go watch it for yourselves to see the birth of a genre that would eventually give us The Walking Dead and The Last of Us.

While the classic zombie horror trope is the slow moving, brain munching monsters that most of us are familiar with, the zombie, like all things, has evolved over the years. The post-war years, the 40s and 50s, saw the Nazi’s making zombies since there was nothing more evil than a Nazi-zombie, and, unsurprisingly, nuclear fallout and radiation were often the leading causes of raising the undead. By the 80s and 90s, the world had been exposed to some rather horrible diseases like Ebola, AIDs and the Avian Flu that made all kinds of merry mayhem in China. Suddenly, the zombie was the result of a virus or some kind, and the zombies weren’t necessarily dead, they were just infected. In Resident Evil, it’s a man-made bio-weapon, the T-virus, that escapes from a lab and in 28 Days Later (2002), it’s a rage virus which escapes from a lab, ravages the world, and finally leads to a complete dystopian collapse. Clearly research labs need to up their security protocols. The zombie also became a little faster. In 2013, World War Z introduced a zombie that is both fast and shows a bit more intelligence than zombies in the past.

Zombies can only be stopped by removing the head or destroying the brain which is why beheadings became particularly popular. In most zombie movies, at least one, though often more members of the surviving party will be infected and turn on the rest of the group. Fellow human survivors often become an even bigger threat than the zombies themselves, as we’ve seen in The Walking Dead, and there is usually at least one person who recognizes a close friend or loved one in the thronging crowd of zombies lusting for brains. A zombie story just wouldn’t be a zombie story without the nicest person in town hammering on the windows trying to eat you.

From zombies created by magic to zombies created by man, be it in a lab or the result of Mother Nature lashing out because humans just can’t help messing with the order of things, zombies as a horror trope is here to stay.

Are They Real?

According to doomsday preppers and zombie enthusiasts, the end times are nigh and the zombie horde is just around the corner. Even our ancient ancestors had plans in place to deal with the undead, so the fear of zombies has been around for a long time.

Keeping the dead in their graves was important in the ancient world. Corpses were pinned with heavy stones, rocks were jammed into a corpse’s mouth to prevent the body from being inhabited by evil spirits, corpses were decapitated and burned to prevent the dead from coming back, and throughout Europe, corpses would be buried on their stomachs, not their backs, so should the corpse return to life, instead of digging up to haunt the living, it will dig itself in deeper. Records from the Bamberg witch trials in the 1600s claim that witches were dancing with reanimated corpses at their witchy ceremonies.

I can’t blame them; a good dance partner can be hard to find. The Epic of Gilgamesh and even the Christian bible has tales of zombies – if you don’t believe me, go read about Lazarus or the gospel of Matthew. Of course, the most famous resurrection is Jesus and there are some people claiming that he was a zombie, but I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole.

You can decide about the zombie state of Jesus for yourself.

Conspiracy theorists are also quick to point out that the US military apparently takes the zombie threat as seriously as our ancient ancestors. A document titled CONOP 8888 outlines a plan for large scale operations dealing with catastrophes such as a zombie apocalypse. The plan is very detailed.

From zombies created by black magic, radiation, or infection to vegetarian zombies that pose no risk to human life, all possibilities are covered. Of course, a zombie apocalypse where the zombies only eat carrots would be a bit of an anti-climax, but at least the US military are planning for every eventuality. There are contingency plans in case zombies overrun hospitals and medical facilities and even plans to deploy remote controlled robots to man critical infrastructure, like power stations, if the zombie threat grows faster than expected.

A chain of command from the President down is clearly laid out so if someone in the chain is lost to the zombie horde, the plan won’t fall apart. This is something many zombie shows could probably learn from. The Pentagon insists that it’s just a training document for students using a fictional scenario since there’s no chance of anyone reading it and thinking the zombie apocalypse is at hand.

Either the government is greatly underestimating the imagination of conspiracy theorists, or they know something we don’t. After all, according the all the movies, the military just can’t be trusted.

Our ancestors took precautions against the undead and doomsday preppers are ready for the impending apocalypse with stores of food, water, guns and enough baseball bats to start a league. However, are they waiting in vain, or are zombies actually real? This is not something we say often on this channel, but zombies aren’t entirely works of fiction.

A Zombie in Haiti

On April 30, 1962, a man named Clairvius Narcisse showed up at the American-directed Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles. He was feverish and spitting up blood but the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. His symptoms soon worsened and, three days later, Narcisse was dead. The attending physicians, one of them American, signed his death certificate. Narcisse was sent to cold storage for 24 hours and from there he was sent to his grave. That should’ve been the end of his story.

However, in 1980, 18 years after burying her brother, Angelina Narcisse was shopping in a market in the village of l’Estere when she was approached by a man claiming to be her long-deceased, not to mention long-buried, brother. Angelina was understandably skeptical, but the man introduced himself using a childhood nickname and knew things that only family members could know. As if reappearing 18 years after being buried isn’t strange enough, Clairvius had an extraordinary tale to tell.

He clearly remembered being in hospital and hearing himself being declared dead while his sister was sobbing next to his bed. He also remembered his funeral. He was alive, fully conscious but unable to move or speak, as his coffin was lowered into the ground.

He recalled the sound of the clumps of dirt hitting the coffin and he felt like he was floating over his grave. He even had a scar on his right cheek caused by a nail driven through the casket. However, he didn’t remain buried for long.

That night, he was raised from his grave by a voodoo priest, a bokor, beaten with a sisal whip and carried off to a sugar plantation where he, along with other zombie slaves, were made to work. It was only after the zombie master died that Clairvius, along with some other zombies, were able to escape and return home. It’s unclear what happened to the other zombie slaves that worked the plantation with him, but around the time that Clairvius reappeared, two women turned up in another village claiming to be zombies and, in northern Haiti, locals came across a group of zombies wandering aimlessly in the fields, so perhaps there is some truth to Clairvius’s tale after all.

There’s a lack of eating brains and violence in this tale, but the story of Clairvius, while the best documented, is far from unique.

In 1937, African-American writer and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston, travelled to Haiti to study voodoo and Haitian customs after studying “Hoodoo”, and African-American version of voodoo. She spent several months in Haiti, even training to be a voodoo priest. However, she became increasingly more spooked by her experience and in her travel book, Tell My Horse, published in 1938, she claimed that zombies were very real. In a 1943 interview, she said that a zombie is supposed to be the living dead – people who die and are resurrected but without their souls. They can take orders and do what their master says and never get tired. While in Haiti, she even got the chance to meet an actual zombie and do something no-one had done before: photograph a zombie. The zombie in question was Felicia Felix-Mentor, a woman who supposedly died at the age of 29 in 1907, only to be spotted wandering by the side of a road by relatives 30 years later who finally checked her into a mental hospital. Experts seem to think that Felix-Mentor mostly likely suffered from some form of mental illness though whether this was the result of zombification or not we’ll never know. However, soon after this meeting, Hurston left Haiti, believing that secret voodoo societies were intent on poisoning her. We can’t have a decoding script without at least one secret society.

While it may not make international headlines, according to some sources, hundreds, sometimes close to a thousand, zombies are reported to local Haitian authorities every year. Hundreds of zombies, secret voodoo societies - what the heck is going on in Haiti?

In order to understand the zombie phenomenon in Haiti, we need to go back even further, to the days when Haiti was the French colony Saint-Domingue in the 17th and 18th century. It was, by far, the most profitable of the French colonies producing 40% of the world’s sugar and 60% of the coffee consumed in Europe. Of course, these profits weren’t due to ethical business practices.

By the late 1700s, Saint-Domingue were importing more slaves annually than its entire white population and, at the peak of slavery, over 90% of the island’s inhabitants were enslaved, forced to work in the sugar cane fields. The conditions were brutal – at least half, if not more, of the slaves who arrived, mainly from West Africa, were worked to death within a few years which meant even more had to be imported.

The slaves believed that dying would release them from slavery and, in death, they would return back home to Africa. It was only in the afterlife that they would finally be free. Living under such brutal conditions must’ve been terrifying, but there was one belief that the slaves feared above all else - the idea that, even in death, you would not be free; even in death, your body would remain a slave.

West African traditions mixed with Native West Indian Taino beliefs and Catholicism, as the slaves were forced to convert to the faith that enslaved them, to create vodoun, more commonly known as voodoo, a deeply misunderstood religion. The fears of an enslaved nation took shape in the form of the zombie – a person, raised from the dead by a voodoo sorcerer known as a bokor, forced to work as a slave, never getting their freedom and never returning home.

Despite having gained their freedom and independence from France in 1804 and finally kicking out the Americans in 1934, corruption was still rife in Haiti with politicians using the threat of zombification to intimidate voters and suppress protests. The National Guard ran the country through much of the 20th century relying on violence and terror. Under the rule of Dr. Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, who was named President for life in 1964, the feared secret police patrolled the streets, behaving with such complete immorality and blind obedience that they were sometimes assumed to be zombies under the dictator’s control.

To a once-enslaved people, the idea that even death could not free them was terrifying. However, even today, it’s not the zombie that is feared. The zombie is a pitiful thing, deserving of sympathy; the true terror is becoming a zombie and the big bad is the zombie master.

Around the time our accredited zombie, Clairvius Narcisse, returned from the dead in the 1980s, Dr. Lamarque Douyon, a Haitian-born but Canadian-trained psychiatrist, had been studying reports of zombies for years. He was convinced that they were real, but proof was hard to find and he couldn’t come up with a scientific explanation for the phenomenon.

He theorized that the victims were only made to look dead with some kind of drug, since raising someone from the dead isn’t possible, but the exact details eluded him. However, the case of Narcisse finally provided him with strong enough evidence that there was something going on to request assistance from colleagues all the way in New York City. The potential of a drug that could induce this kind of state could have all sorts of magical medical applications, so a group was formed to raise the necessary funds and an ethno-biologist, Wade Davis, a 28-year old Canadian working on his doctorate degree in biology, was chosen to go to Haiti and investigate zombies and, more importantly, how they were made.

Davis arrived in Haiti with a list of contacts, among them one Marcel Pierre, a voodoo sorcerer, who was apparently willing to help an ethno-biologist out. Davis accompanied his friendly neighborhood voodoo sorcerer to collect ingredients and watch him make the powder, grinding together the dried ingredients with a mortar and pestle. However, Davis knew his plants and he knew that none of the ingredients used in the powder could produce the powerful effects associated with zombification, and he was right.

The first batch was a complete dud. To absolutely no-one’s surprise, the wily islander had seen a naïve tourist and taken him for a ride since I assume the powder wasn’t free.

About three weeks later, Davis returned to Pierre, challenging him and calling him a charlatan. Now, I’m not sure whether it was bravery or stupidity, but calling a voodoo sorcerer a charlatan takes guts. There are some beliefs you don’t mess with and voodoo is definitely at the top of that list.

Pierre, somewhat miffed, gave the annoying Canadian a second vial which turned out to be the real deal, and after some bravado on the side of Davis, agreed to show the ethno-biologist how the powder was made. The final product looked like dry, black dirt and consisted of parts of toads, sea worms, lizards, tarantulas, fish, and human bones, obtained from a child’s grave during a nighttime trip to a cemetery. Not exactly standard scientific practice, but when in Rome, or I suppose Haiti in this case.

There are a number of ways to administer this powder in order to get the zombification process underway. The poison can be rubbed into the victim’s skin, ingested with food or drink or even injected directly into the blood stream, using a blow dart for the more dexterous bokor, and within hours, the victim will feel nauseated and have difficulty breathing. This is followed by a pins-and-needles sensation in the arms and legs, slowly progressing throughout the whole body.

Eventually, the subject will be paralyzed and his, or her, zombies aren’t gender biased, lips will turn blue due to lack of oxygen. Sometimes within a matter of hours, the future zombie’s metabolism is lowered to the point where the victim appears dead. Of course, they aren’t actually dead, they’re still fully aware but due to the paralysis, they can’t say anything.

Once dead, the body is taken to a hospital and declared officially dead by a doctor and the victim finds themselves in a grave soon after. Haiti is hot and refrigerated storage facilities for the newly dead are limited, so it’s best to get the dead in their graves quickly.

Once the victim is in the ground, the bokor waits, sometimes for nightfall or just until all the mourners have gone to return to the grave and dig up the body. This has to happen within eight hours otherwise the victim will suffocate and since Haitian zombies aren’t the reanimated dead, a dead zombie is, well, dead. Once the freshly turned zombie has been dug up, the bokor performs an ancient vodou rite during which he, or she, traps the victim’s “ti bon ange”, the part of the soul that makes the person the person they are, in whatever receptacle they have on hand, be it a mystical clay vessel or grandma’s old Tupperware with mismatched lids.

Voodoo is a very practical religion. This container is then wrapped in a piece of the victim’s clothing or some other personal possession and hidden in a secret place only known to the bokor. After a day or two, the bokor feeds the newly zombified victim a hallucinogenic mixture which revives the victim but keeps the zombie in a submissive and confused state.

The victim can’t speak, has no memory and just isn’t the person he, or she, used to be. All of this makes the zombie easy to control so the enslaved zombie is sent to work as a farm laborer or construction worker. The zombies remain under the control of the bokor that created them until the bokor dies.

Only then are they released from their enslavement and free to go home to their village or return to their grave, you know, whatever works for them.

The recipe for this zombie-making poison isn’t exact; it’s more an art form than a science and different sorcerers will have different recipes meaning different poisons will contain different ingredients and the final result isn’t guaranteed. Instead of just paralyzing the victim, the powder could just as easily kill them. Sometimes the poison works as advertised, but the sorcerer can’t get the zombie out of his or her grave fast enough leading to suffocation or severe brain damage at the very least. However, Davis concluded that the powder must work often enough that zombies aren’t just a figment of the Haitian imagination.

Davis’s original hypothesis was that the powder most likely contained zombie’s cucumber, or Datura, a powerful psychoactive plant found in West Africa and other tropical areas. However, while Datura could create a stupor in a large enough dose, it couldn’t mimic death; there really aren’t a whole lot of compounds that can do that. However, one of the ingredients Pierre included in the second powder was a dried fish, a species of puffer or blowfish, which is found across the world.

The fish contains tetrodotoxin, one of the most powerful non-protein poisons known to man. It showed up as an ingredient in practically every sample of zombie powder Davis acquired.

Puffer fish poisoning is a little more common than you might think – it’s a specialty in Japan, where only licensed chefs are allowed to prepare it but, even then, people can still die and several dozen people die each year. Apparently, there’s no known antidote for puffer fish poisoning; you either get better by yourself or you die. More than 60% of those suffering puffer fish poisoning don’t make it but accounts from people who do sound a bit like zombification – victims are conscious but can’t speak or move. One man who died from eating puffer fish miraculously recovered in the morgue seven days later.

That must’ve been quite a shock to the morgue employees. Another man was already nailed into his coffin when he managed to revive; talk about a close call. A lot of this sounds very similar to what Narcisse, our real-life zombie back in Haiti, described.

While tetrodotoxin can certainly start the ball rolling, it’s not strong enough to turn someone into a zombie permanently. If that was the case, the zombie apocalypse would’ve started in Japan some time ago. The islanders believe that it’s the power of the priest who raised the zombie which keeps the zombie in thrall.

However, Davis theorized that it was a combination of the belief in zombies, the pure terror and psychological trauma of the zombification process which includes being buried alive, along with more drugs given to the zombie once he or she is “resurrected” from the grave that keep these zombies in their trance-like state. This might be where the Datura comes in; feeding zombies Datura paste, made with sweet potato and cane sugar, or food laced with Datura, probably just intensifies their disorientation. Of course, brain damage due to oxygen deprivation if you can’t get to your zombie quickly enough would also affect the victim.

However, a part of this process is also the victim, just returned from the grave, reconstructing their own identity as that of a zombie. To be very clear, we’re not victim blaming here. Basically, people believe they are zombies since they know the process they just went through creates zombies.

A person who doesn’t believe in zombies would be a lot harder to control. Reconstructing your own identity according to cultural beliefs happens everywhere; this is just an extreme example. While many voodoo practitioners believe that zombification is possible, they are, actually, in the minority, contrary to what movies might have you believe.

Most vodoun practitioners don’t believe in zombies.

People who had been identified as zombies, like Narcisse, were usually considered to be criminals by their communities. Narcisse was found guilty by a rural court for selling land that he didn’t own. This was when Davis discovered the secret societies, many of them proudly tracing their origins back to bands of escaped slaves who revolted against the French in the late 1700s.

These secret societies meet in secret, it’s in the name really, and do their own form of rural policing using the threat of zombification as a way to maintain order. The practice of zombification as punishment is used to punish those guilty of rape or theft of land that somehow managed to avoid punishment by the authorities. Stealing land in Haiti is a serious crime since land is considered sacred.

Being turned into a zombie is the worst possible punishment - you lose your freedom, free will, and independence, the very things valued above all else due to Haiti’s history of slavery. Of course, you don’t necessarily need to be found guilty of a crime; a morally-challenged bokor employed by your enemies would happily zombify you if the price is right.

If you’re unlucky enough to believe in zombies and get dosed with a zombie poison, you’re out of luck. There doesn’t seem to be an antidote for zombie poison but much like the various priests and sorcerers have their own concoctions to turn someone into a zombie, some Vodoun practitioners believe that another cocktail, of which the recipe again changes from priest to priest, can revive a zombie. The common ingredient is salt as salt is considered a purifying agent which will allow the zombie to speak, returning it from its sub-human state.

It’s even believed that salt may act like a homing beacon leading the zombie back to its grave and final rest. If you’re the bokor who made them, you want to make yourself scarce should your zombies get their hands on some salt as they will turn against their creator, violently. However, as long as their diets remain bland, they are generally not aggressive or dangerous, unlike the Hollywood zombies.

Davis’s research seems sound at first. Some of the samples of zombie powder which he brought back to America also had dramatic results when used on the skin of rats and a rhesus monkey. The subjects first became lethargic and then paralyzed, but eventually fully recovered. However, there was some criticism from academic circles regarding his methods.

Some felt that his approach was more sensational than scientific. There were also some ethical concerns considering Davis observed a grave desecration when accompanying his helpful voodoo sorcerer shopping for ingredients. While this certainly seems morally questionable, I think the prime directive applies here – that is how the zombies are made. You can’t really expect a bokor to make a zombie powder following another culture’s code of ethics.

Some scientists also claimed that some the powder samples contained little to no tetrodotoxin. However, since each bokor uses his or her own recipe to make the poison, and the powders probably fail more often than they succeed, this would actually make sense. Several studies of zombies also revealed that most zombies were people suffering from mental illness and cases of mistaken identity by bereaved relatives.

Not to mention that, if there were plantations filled with zombie slaves doing all the work, no-one has yet managed to stumble across them suggesting that zombification probably doesn’t happen often, if at all. Perhaps the threat of zombification is really all that’s needed. While all of this is true, none of it invalidates Davis’s research.

He never said that there were legions of zombies running around Haiti. Considering that the powders are hit and miss, depending on the bokor making it and the ingredients used, it’s far more likely that most people die in attempts at zombification. Whether Western scientists believe in zombies or not, the people of Haiti do – making a zombie is against the law.

According to the 2014 Doc Of The Dead, a documentary on zombies and the zombie genre, zombie-making is such a problem in Haiti that the 1883 Haitian Criminal Code even outlawed the making of zombies. Now, in fairness, the penal code doesn’t use the word zombie and doesn’t explicitly outlaws the creation of zombies; however, it does state that poisoning someone with a substance that will result in a prolonged stated of lethargy, regardless of how the poison was administered, would be considered attempted murder. If someone is buried in this state and dies, it becomes murder. So whether or not there were zombies running around Haiti in such numbers that it needed to be outlawed, it seems that the practice of attempting to make zombies were accepted enough to make it into law. Perhaps enough people died at the hands of bokors trying to make zombies that the government felt the need to step in.

The Haitian zombie is not the brain-eating gore-fest most of us associate with the word zombie, but the Haitian zombies were first. It was the American soldiers returning home during the occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934 who first brought the idea of zombies home with them and it was the Western imagination that did the rest.

Bringing the Dead Back to Life

If there’s something that humans fear above all else, it’s death. Books, movies and even science have been preoccupied with the question of prolonging human life or, should the worst happen, reanimating the dead. But is it possible to bring a dead body back to life? Well, let’s just say, Mary Shelley might’ve been on the right track.

Experiments to bring the dead back to life started as early as the 1800s with physicist Giovanni Aldini who believed the answer to this great mystery could be found in electricity. He worked for years to prove that his uncle, Luigi Galvani, was onto something with his theory on galvanism – the idea that electricity flowed from the brain to supply the body with the vital force it needed to stay alive. The goal was to prove that electricity could even be used to revive the dead.

His experiments started on animals, of course. He would hook up the deceased corpse to a powerful battery and the shocks would convulse the corpses as if they were alive. He did some spectacular public demonstrations, but just playing with electricity and dead animals wasn’t enough for him.

In January 1803, George Foster was executed at Newgate Prison for the murder of his wife and daughter. After hanging in temperatures two below freezing for two hours, the perfectly chilled corpse was quickly carted off to London’s Royal College of Surgeons for a most spectacular spectacle in the anatomy theatre. The corpse was hooked up to the battery and the electricity used to stimulate the corpse’s nerves and muscles. Unfortunately for Foster, Aldini’s experiment was not a success. The corpse convulsed, his jaw quivered and his left eye opened, which must’ve caused quite a stir, but Foster remained very dead; not a zombie in sight. Aldini may not have reanimated a corpse but he probably was part of Mary Shelley’s inspiration for her classic creation Frankenstein, which, since this apparently needs to be said, is not the first zombie book. It’s a lot of firsts, but it’s not the first zombie story.

Following Aldini, there have been a lot of experiments on animals which I have no intention of describing in any detail since most of these experiments were deeply disturbing. Probably the best known of these must be the work of Sergei Bryukhonenko, a graduate from Moscow University Medical School in 1914, who used two decapitated dog heads to illustrate his heart-lung machine in 1925. Using this machine, he could keep the heads alive for about 100 minutes.

He eventually got more funding, refining his experiments, and by 1928, rumors were rife on American campuses that the Russians were reanimating the dead and making zombies. They weren’t entirely wrong.

In 1929, a fellow Russian scientist, who had experimented on all manner of creatures for years, decided to try and reanimate a human corpse. After pumping the body full of a cocktail containing all kinds of drugs, the heart actually heaved rather violently and a wet choking sound erupted from the patient’s throat sending all the assistants fleeing in terror. The two scientists in charge actually managed to keep the heart beating for around 20 minutes before it stopped for a final time.

In another experiment, in 1934, the corpse of a suicide victim was used and the man actually opened his eyes. The reanimation only lasted for two minutes because the doctors, suddenly realizing that just because you could do something doesn’t mean you should, quickly ended the experiment. It seems that someone realized that this human experimentation was probably a bad idea because future experiments in reanimation would, once again, be carried out on dogs but you can go read about those in your own time.

Suffice to say, while I’m not usually rooting for the zombie team, in this case, if the dogs did come back as zombies and ate their creators’ brains, I probably would give the zombie dogs some space to work before changing their undead state to a more permanent state of rest.

However, you don’t always need a mad scientist on standby. Sometimes people just come back to life after dying. It happens often enough that medicine even has a term for it: the Lazarus phenomenon. In 2011, Kelly Dwyer, aged 46, fell into a pond while hiking in New Hampshire.

Her heart stopped before the paramedics could reach her and her body temperature dropped to around 15 degrees Celsius. She had been dead for around five hours when doctors finally decided to switch off the life support but, instead of signing a death certificate, Dwyer’s heart spontaneously started beating again, and she fully recovered in two weeks. As far as I know, she’s not craving brains, but it seems that the dead coming back to life is not impossible.

Around 2019, a team from Yale University experimented with reanimating pig brains. By pumping preserving agents and drugs into the dead brain, specifically targeting the neural pathways that would’ve been damaged by a lack of oxygen, the team managed to restore some cellular activity in the brains a few hours after the animal had died in a slaughterhouse. The result was that the brain began displaying signs of metabolic activity and cellular functions, like a living brain, but it wasn’t alive or conscious.

Yet. However, it certainly wasn’t entirely dead either. Zombie pigs; that’s where it all starts.

Of course, this raises all kinds of questions about the nature of being alive and brain-dead as if that wasn’t a tricky enough area already and there are certainly some promising medical applications to this. The team has since moved on to study donated human brains but they have to be very careful. Restoring a human brain to consciousness would be ethically problematic to say the least.

No-one wants to wake up in a jar.

We have no way of knowing whether any of these reanimated humans would’ve been Frankenstein or The Walking Dead, but I’m fairly sure it’s just a matter of time until science finally reaches the point where death is no longer final. Hopefully, we don’t all wake up with a lust for brains.

Zombies in Nature

Of course, you don’t need a mad scientist or a plane ticket to Haiti to see zombies. You can just walk out your front door; there could very well be a zombie living in your garden. These zombies are not undead, they’re just at the mercy of parasites.

Most parasites eventually kill their landlords, but it’s the parasites that influence the behavior of their host, manipulating them into dying in a specific place or at a specific time, or being eaten by a specific thing, which is really creepy. There are more zombies in nature than you might think, so I will present my personal favorites to give you some sleeplessness nights or make you reconsider a career in entomology.

Firstly, there is the jewel wasp and the cockroach. The jewel wasp picks a roach that meets their specifications. They inject the roach with a venomous, mind-controlling cocktail, much like a wild Saturday night in most varsity towns. Then the wasp bites off one of the roach’s antennae and using the stump, walks the roach to a prepared burrow.

No dragging required – Smart. Here it lays some eggs inside the roach’s back, then blocks the entrance to the burrow so the roach can’t get out and other predators can’t get in. Soon the eggs hatch and the wasp larvae snack on the roach until they’re big enough to go find another unfortunate roach.

Another wasp species targets a specific spider, native to Ecuador. The wasp stings the spider, inducing a state of temporary paralysis during which the wasp engages in some arts and crafts and glues an egg to the spider’s abdomen. Once the paralysis wears off, the spider just gets up and goes about its business as usual.

Within around 7 to 14 days the egg hatches and the larva, still attached to the spider, drinks the spider’s juices. When it’s time for the larva to enter its final stage of life, it chemically induces the spider, with a cocktail of its own, to deviate from its normal web building style. Spiders usually build a funnel or burrow type web when it’s ready to molt and the wasp baby tricks the spider into thinking it’s time.

These spiders are quite social and rarely wander away from their colonies but, under the wasp baby’s evil influence, the spider will leave the colony and go spin the special web. After the web is complete, the larva kills and eats the spider, did you really expect anything else, and spins its own little cocoon, safely in the spider’s special web where it matures. I’m a bit arachnophobic, but even I wouldn’t wish that on a spider.

Providing food and safety is one thing, but some parasites also need transportation. One such example is the California killifish and their parasitic flatworms. The flatworms can live inside the fish, but they can’t reproduce inside fish. They need birds to reproduce so somehow they have to get from the fish to the bird.

To do this, the flatworms adjust the fish’s brain chemistry, basically leading the fish to engage is more risky behavior like swimming closer to the surface, rubbing against rocks, or twisting around, making them more visible to birds so the birds can get to their favorite snack more easily. Once they’re back inside the birds, the worms reproduce and the beautiful circle of life continues.

Thankfully, it’s unlikely that these parasites will target humans. Most of us are a little more sophisticated than your average roach, and we’ll probably notice if a wasp glues an egg to our backs. However, evolution is a funny thing and it doesn’t mean that there’s nothing in nature that targets humans – bacteria and viruses aren’t as picky.

Zombie diseases

While there’s no disease that turns you into a ravenous zombie just yet, there are quite a few disease that can make you behave like a zombie, make you look like a zombie, or make you think that you’re a zombie. There’s even a disease that’s spread by eating human brains, the preferred snack of zombies everywhere.

Leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, a bacterial infection which has been around since biblical times, can definitely make someone look a bit like a zombie. Leprosy won’t make parts of the body fall off, that’s just a myth, but severe nerve damage could lead to victims losing sensation in their limbs, so they don’t notice injuries, which can lead to gangrene and amputation. The infection also causes skin lesions which might make the victim look like they’re literally rotting away, and nerve damage leading to numbness makes it difficult to move around leading to the shuffling walk we often associate with zombies.

The disease doesn’t affect your brain though so while you may look the part of zombie, you’re still very much alive and human. These days it can be cured, so fear not, and interesting fact of the day, leprosy can jump from armadillos to humans, proving that bacteria can make a home just about anywhere.

Prion diseases, like Mad Cow disease which you get from eating mad cows, are caused by a misfolded protein in the brain. We’re not entirely sure what causes the misfolding in the first place, and, thankfully, while it’s contagious, it’s not exactly the flu. In the 50s and 60s, a prion disease known as Kuru disease ran amok among a tribe in Papua New Guinea.

By 1957, there were around 200 deaths per year. The disease caused an unsteady gait, changes in mood, and neurological issues with open sores that got easily infected and complete unresponsiveness being the last stage before, you guessed it, death. This particular tribe practiced cannibalism as part of their traditional funerary rites and, as it turns out, one of the very specific circumstances needed for prions to be contagious is through eating human flesh, especially brains.

This practice was abolished in the 60s and since then, the problem has resolved itself. We’re not here to judge anyone for their cultural practices, but I think what we’ll be taking away from this is make sure your meat is properly cooked to avoid Mad Cow and don’t eat your relatives if you want to avoid becoming a zombie. Prion diseases have no cure.

Possibly the strangest disease is the one that makes you think you’re a zombie. Cortard’s Syndrome, or “Walking Corpse Syndrome” is, thankfully, a very rare mental disorder which make those experiencing it believe that they are dead, decomposing and even missing vital organs even though their bodies are still fully functional. This hallucination will often lead a person to withdraw from society and neglect their basic needs like eating and bathing.

Of course, this lack of self-care will lead to malnourishment, dehydration, and all manner of nasty things eventually making their delusions a reality. Some people will even insist on going to a morgue or request an autopsy to confirm that they are, in fact, dead.

However, the closest thing we have to a zombie virus is rabies. This is a truly horrible disease with a near 100% fatality rate. Its natural host is canids, like foxes, dogs, and wolves, but this virus can live inside any mammal and is transmitted through saliva so, like any good zombie virus, the most likely way you’ll get infected is through a bite.

Animals infected with rabies become incredibly aggressive and will often foam at the mouth. The virus can stay dormant for up to a year, the record is five years, before becoming active and attacking the nerve cells leading to all manner of delightful symptoms such as jerky movements, full or partial paralysis, mania, delirium and strange and often very aggressive behavior. Of course, unlike a zombie, you’re not actually dead, yet.

However, by the time the symptoms start showing, it’s too late. Your time’s up. The virus will kill you, usually in around 14 days.

Don’t panic though, rabies can be cured if it’s treated immediately, so if you’re bitten by an animal, whether it’s foaming at the mouth or not, err on the side of caution and get thee to an emergency room immediately before the brain craving starts.

Is a zombie outbreak possible?

Scientifically, there’s no such thing as a zombie virus and a pandemic spread by people biting each other is not very likely; it’s not a very efficient way of transmission, especially if the zombies are slow and stupid. However, with enough funding and limited ethics, I have no doubt that someone will eventually cook up something to make zombies. While a mutated rabies virus is the first thing that comes to mind, there’s actually quite a few other nasty surprises that could lead us down the road to a zombie apocalypse.

Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite which can live comfortably in pretty much any mammal including mice, chimpanzees and, yes you guessed it, humans; however, in a pinch, fish and reptiles will do. However, they only reproduce inside of felines, both domestic and wild, so the parasite needs to find a way to make it back into their host of choice. In order to do this, the T. gondii influences the behavior of the host. Animals infected with this parasite often become more aggressive, less fearful of their natural predators, and engages in reckless behavior. Mice and rats become less afraid of cats, and even become attracted to the smell of cat urine, a smell that would normally repulse them and make them avoid a specific area. Unsurprisingly, this reckless lifestyle usually leads to the mice and chimps becoming cat and leopard snacks which is exactly what the T. gondii wants.

Here is the scary bit - Toxoplasma gondii has infected an estimated one billion people according to a 2020 research paper. Most people are asymptomatic; however, infection can be deadly for infants and people with a weak immune system. If the parasite makes it all the way to your brain, it can lead to hallucinations or even psychotic symptoms. Some studies also suggest that humans infected with this parasite sometimes become more aggressive, much like those rats who go looking for a fight and lose. There are also studies suggesting that it can change an infected person’s behavior leading them to take more risks or become more selfish. Of course, risky and selfish behavior, as seen during the Covid pandemic, kind of describes half the population already, but that’s probably just coincidence. Considering that human ancestors were most likely part of the food source for big cats, like sabre-tooth tigers and the like, some research suggest that T. gondii has been hitching a ride in humans for millions of years. Despite spending all this quality time with us, the parasite has not turned us into complete zombies just yet. However, there are a lot of similarities between humans and rats on a cellular level, so, in theory, it would only require a bit of evolution on the side of T. gondii to manipulate people into behaving in a way most advantageous to the parasite, for example, making us feed, protect, and clean up after the parasite’s host of choice. Well, I suppose it might be affecting a few people, but at least it’s not affecting our fear response, leading us to lose our sense of self-preservation, and making us throw ourselves into big cat enclosures in zoos and getting out of our cars in Southern African nature reserves to get eaten by lions. Oh wait… Look, since we’re not felines, it’s unlikely to drive us to the point where we’ll eat each other, so let’s take the win and move on.

In the popular PC game turned TV Show, The Last of Us, the zombie apocalypse is started by a parasitic fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis which takes over the human body and spreads infection through fungal spores. I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that this is a real thing; there are more than 750 different species of cordyceps out there. The good news is that this fungus targets insects and each one of the 750 different species of cordyceps targets a specific species of insect. They are particularly fond of carpenter ants. Once the fungus infects an ant, it will compel the ant to leave the colony and start climbing a tree to get to higher ground, usually following light. Once the ant reaches the desired spot, it will bite down on a leave or stick and die. The fungus will erupt from the ant’s head and gleefully rain down spores on anything that moves below; if those things happen to be carpenter ants, all the better.

If The Last of Us has been giving you sleepless nights, rest easy - Ophiocordyceps unilateralis can’t infect humans. For that matter, it can’t even properly infect a different species of ant; it’s carpenter ant or nothing. It’s also unlikely that it will suddenly evolve enough to jump species and infect humans. We are far more complicated than ants, and the human body temperature is simply too high; fungi need lower temperatures to thrive. It would take millions of years of evolution for this fungus to become a threat to humans and, by then, I’m pretty sure we would’ve destroyed ourselves in a whole lot of horrifically creative ways.

However, I like sandwiches, so now I have some bad news again. This specific fungus may not be a danger in the foreseeable future, but fungi can develop thermo tolerance, so basically a resistance to higher temperatures, meaning our high body temperature won’t save us. Along with fungi slowly adapting to reproduce at higher temperatures, human body temperature has slowly been falling since the 19th century, making us even more acceptable for a family of fungi looking for a safer neighborhood. In fact, some fungi, like Candida Auris, have already done so and thrive on higher temperatures. The fungus has been reported in more than 30 countries and showed up a little out of nowhere. It also spreads from person to person which is kind of new for a fungus. They don’t usually do that. Candida Auris can cause severe infections, but doesn’t change the patient’s behavior or manipulates the patient’s mind in any way. It’s not a zombie-making fungus yet, but it certainly suggests that the kind of fungal infection we see in The Last of Us isn’t impossible.

One of the factors that could be at play to explain the sudden arrival of Candida Auris is global warming. However, fungi is not our only problem when it comes to global warming. In 2014, researchers discovered a most fascinating virus, a so-called giant virus, around 30 000 years old, in the Siberian permafrost. It’s called a giant virus because it’s clearly visible under a microscope. Its size and complexity makes it particularly dangerous which makes me wonder why they didn’t just leave it in the ice. Have none of these researchers seen The Thing? Luckily, the virus only infected amoebas, not people, but there is the possibility of more dangerous viruses lurking in the world’s ice and climate change could lead to these viruses resurfacing and coming back to life. We really need to look into this global warming thing. Being hot and a zombie doesn’t sound like a good time to me.

Finally, if the parasites, fungi or viruses don’t get you, you can just inflict the horrors of being a zombie on yourself. There’s already a zombie outbreak of sorts in many major cities across the world thanks to an assortment of designer drugs.

Xylazine, also known as ‘tranq’, ‘tranq dope’, or the ‘zombie drug’, was originally developed as an analgesic and sedative for animals in veterinary medicine and is not safe for human consumption. However, it didn’t take long for humans to start using, or rather abusing, medication formulated for our furry friends. Users are often described as zombies due to the effects and it can also cause large open wounds, like ulcers and abscesses, which spread and, if not treated, can start rotting.

A person stumbling about, in a trance-like state, with rotting limbs definitely fits the description of a zombie thus leading to the nickname ‘zombie drug’. Tranq is not the only one - there are a whole lot of drugs that can do some nasty things to your body like Flakka and Krokodil but we’re not going into the shadows, we’re decoding the unknown, so we’re skipping the gory details. Suffice to say that while these drugs don’t raise the dead and make them walk around the city chomping on humans, it comes pretty darn close so kids, don’t do drugs!

How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

The odds of a zombie apocalypse ever getting out of hand are unlikely. Zombies may be good at killing people, but humans are even better and we’ve been practicing for centuries. In the right circumstances, anything can be a weapon and don’t count out the military. Militaries stockpile in case of war, so they will have a decent amount of machine guns, bullets for machine guns, tanks, fuel for the tanks and soldiers to man them, planes and bombs ready to wipe out the zombie menace before it spreads.

And they won’t be going at it alone. Mother Nature is probably going to be our biggest ally against zombies. Extreme temperatures, bacteria and predators are going to make short work of stumbling corpses. For that matter, you don’t even have to kill a zombie if you’re a pacifist.

Just shoot out the legs – once they’re immobile, they’re no longer a threat and nature can take its course.

However, if by some disaster, you do find yourself in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, we have a whole lot of zombie movies to give you some tips on how to survive.

Firstly, don’t panic. Immediately get away from the zombies. Zombies are usually slow so odds are that you’re probably faster than them. Retreat to a shopping mall, retail store or pub, preferably a familiar one so you know where the exits are and you have access to food, water, flashlights, an emergency radio and weapons.

Stay away from densely populated areas – the more people there are, the more zombies there are. Barricade all the entrances and stay put no matter what. Don’t get surrounded and, if you do need to make a break for it, don’t get yourself backed into a corner or an enclosed space. Remember that anyone bitten by zombie will become a zombie – just because it’s your best friend, your mom or the girl you’ve had a crush on for five years doesn’t mean they will be the exception to the rule so take care of that quickly.

There are also some mistakes to avoid. Don’t take shelter in a vehicle if you don’t have the keys, or the vehicle is out of gas, and remember to use a seatbelt if you intend to ram the zombies. You don’t want to go flying through a windshield.

Don’t leave blades, cudgels and other weapons lying around for the zombies to find and, whatever you do, don’t teach the zombies how to use guns. You’d think that one was obvious, but apparently not. Speaking of weapons, don’t give your only weapon, especially if it’s a gun, to the most hysterical person in the party – that never ends well.

If you retreat into a basement or cellar, see the rule about enclosed spaces, take all your supplies with you. You’re going to be kicking yourself if you’re stuck in a dark basement without a torch. As with a fire, don’t take the lift if the building is teeming with zombies; they will inevitably be waiting for you when the doors open no matter what floor you’re on.

Finally, whatever you do, don’t let personal feelings and arguments stand in the way of survival. You can debate the morality of your actions when you’re out of danger and, unless you happen to have a therapist in your party, family baggage can be sorted out later.

Most importantly, buckle up and enjoy your apocalypse!

Conclusion

Zombies may be the newest kids on the block when it comes to horror movie classics, but they are far more adaptable and versatile than any of their fellow monsters. From brain eating, lumbering corpses, to witty love interests, the zombie is a blank canvas – it can be anything you want it to be which is probably why the zombie is so popular. I’ve never seen a vampire walk or a werewolf crawl, but I have participated in a zombie run and, honestly, it was a blast. In 2022, the Jakarta Light Rail Transit even held a zombie-themed event on a train, reminiscent of the 2016 Korean movie, Train to Busan, as a way to promote public transportation. Of course, I wouldn’t try that in America or South Africa; your fake undead might become real dead, real quick.

While the violent, brain-eating shambling corpses depicted by Hollywood are not a thing, and it’s highly unlikely to ever happen, zombies are very real. True, none of them are actually dead; they’re the victims of drugs, parasites and cultural beliefs, but with global warming melting the ice caps, releasing all sorts of viruses not seen for millions of years and fungi evolving to adapt to warmer climates, the zombie apocalypse might be a bigger threat than we realize. Sure, the world might end, but so will the 9-5 rat race, traffic jams, the Kardashians, and a barrage of social media invites from people you have no interest in reconnecting with, so, you know, I think the time is ready for an apocalypse.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the origin of the word ‘zombie’?

The most likely origin of the word ‘zombie’ is the Congolese word ‘nzambi,’ which means ‘the spirit of a dead person.‘

What is the first official feature-length zombie movie?

The first official feature-length zombie movie is ‘White Zombie,’ released in 1932.

Who is considered to have introduced zombies to the American audience?

William Seabrook is often considered to have introduced zombies to the American audience with his travel book ‘The Magic Island,’ published in 1927.

What is the significance of the movie ‘Night of the Living Dead’?

‘Night of the Living Dead,’ released in 1968, changed the zombie trope and cemented the zombie as a vehicle for social commentary.

What are some real-life examples of zombies in nature?

Examples of zombies in nature include the jewel wasp controlling cockroaches, a wasp species targeting specific spiders, and the California killifish manipulated by parasitic flatworms.

What is the ‘zombie drug’?

The ‘zombie drug’ is Xylazine, also known as ‘tranq,’ which is an analgesic and sedative for animals that has been abused by humans, leading to a trance-like state and rotting limbs.

What are some tips for surviving a zombie apocalypse?

Tips for surviving a zombie apocalypse include not panicking, retreating to a secure location with supplies, avoiding densely populated areas, and not letting personal feelings interfere with survival.

What is the significance of the Haitian zombie phenomenon?

The Haitian zombie phenomenon is rooted in the history of slavery and the voodoo religion, where zombies are created by bokors using a powder containing tetrodotoxin and other ingredients.

What is the ‘Lazarus phenomenon’?

The ‘Lazarus phenomenon’ is a medical term for when a person’s heart spontaneously starts beating again after being declared dead.

What is the potential threat of global warming in relation to zombies?

Global warming could release ancient viruses and fungi from melting ice caps, potentially leading to new zombie-like threats.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Zombies: Horror Movie Trope or Grim Reality?
• Hero image source by Tawhid Sadman / openverse, cc0.