![]() Just slap some clay and paint on their faces, and voila! As a result, they made appearances in fare that was sub par, shoddily made, and barely seen, the sort of films that are only worth watching with the boys of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It took maybe five dollars to turn an actor into an undead monster. In the next three decades, zombies became the abused stepchildren of cinema. Granted, he’d had plenty of practice at that, and the name was a bit of a tip-off. The true villain of the piece was Lugosi as the Vodun sorcerer Murder Legendre. These monsters, firmly rooted in the Caribbean mythology, simply stared silently at the screen they never attacked a fainting damsel, or clawed at a square-jawed hero. And it was a rather disappointing debut, at least from our bloodthirsty vantage. Now that’s a white zombie!It wasn’t until 1932 that a zombie stalked the silver screen, in the Bela Lugosi-helmed White Zombie. This was the fellow who refused to write about cannibal tribes in the Amazon until he’d joined them for a leg of man (he reportedly said it tasted like pork, but needed more, yes, salt). Then again, perhaps Seabrook’s word should be taken with a grain of salt. The first recorded sighting of a flesh-and-blood zombie didn’t come until 1929, when the American adventurer William Seabrook was taken to see a group of them toiling at a field in Haiti. And as any civilized person will tell you, something doesn’t exist until it’s been properly written down never mind the generations of folk who passed the story down from mouth to mouth. That’s when the term first appeared in The Oxford English Dictionary. Officially, the zombie has been around since 1819. But if you were brought back as a zombie, you could be forced to work until you were literally falling apart. At least a slave could look forward to an escape in death-a sort of long and peaceful respite from whips and chains. The resurrected would be mindless, utterly subservient creatures.įor a country populated by slaves and the descendants of slaves, zombies were the ultimate terror. Only the darkest priests knew the rituals, but the results were always the same. See, the earliest zombies were people who had been brought back to “life” through black magic and arcane potions made of ground fish and noxious herbs. Cross the wrong Vodun priest, give your master some lip, and chances were good that you’d find yourself waking up in a coffin without any memory of who you once were. This wasn’t because they feared being attacked by zombies. But for a chicken, that’s a much more exciting way to check out most just end up in a KFC bucket.īack from the dead, Voodoo style.But back to the point: zombies! For the Caribbean people, zombies were basically the worst thing that could possibly happen to them. Voodoo has gotten a majorly bad rap thanks to Hollywood-and okay, yeah, there are ceremonies where the occasional chicken meets its maker in order to bring the congregation closer to said maker. Here, the zombie became intrinsically tied to the Vodun (or “voodoo”) religion. The zombie was first given life in the Caribbean of the early 1800’s, where the sugar cane plantations were worked by thousands of African slaves. Before George Romero gave them teeth and the urge to use them in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, zombies were little more than brainless slaves. What few people know is that the lurching, ravenous undead of the screen have only been around for forty years. And then say that a zombie is a flesh-eating monster. Chances are they’ll give you a strange look. Now, that’s a zombie.Stop an average stranger on the street and ask them what a zombie is.
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