Zombie Jamboree

4 2 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE FEBRUARY 2 0 1 2

Culture

Unraveling the Undead

Our obsession with zombies, from the Congo to Hollywood

by MARIAN KESTER COOMBS

Like humans, zombies came out of Africa.

There they led rich lives being worshipped as

Congolese snake gods (nzambi). The ability

of certain snakes to use poison to paralyze

their prey was ritualistically imitated by tribal priests,

who then proclaimed themselves able to resurrect the

dead as well. In such vodoun or Obeah cults, the term

nzambi migrated in meaning to “spirits of the dead.”

Transported to the Americas, vodoun took root in

Caribbean slave culture, mating with indigenous religions

to spawn zombies, zumbies, jumbies, and duppies

and spreading northward to the continent. By the

17th century vodoun was strong enough to trigger

the Salem witch hysteria of 1692. Tituba, a Carib Indian

slave bought by Samuel Parris in Barbados and

brought to Salem, filled her young mistresses’ heads

with vodoun notions like invocation of the devil,

possession, trances, animal familiars, and the sticking

of pins into “poppetts” (dolls) made to resemble

enemies. The girls’ psyches broke down, alternating

between hysterics and catatonia. Tituba was among

the first arrested and was the first to confess, in lurid

detail—yet she survived while 24 others did not.

In this case the ancient European belief in witches,

lingering just below the surface of 17th-century Protestantism,

reacted violently when brought into contact

with the live coal of African sympathetic magic.

Although Arthur Miller would have us believe (in

“The Crucible”) that the fault lay entirely with the uptight,

theocratic “parochial snobbery” of the Massachusetts

Bay colonists—frustrated folk keen to punish

and avenge—in Salem, at least, culture shock played

a major role.

Richard Hughes’s novel A High Wind in Jamaica

(1929), set in the 19th century, opens with a British

colonial family so spooked by vodoun influence that

the mother insists the children be shipped back to

England for their souls’ salvation. “Duppies cannot

be mistaken for living people,” she discovers that her

children have been instructed, “because their heads

are turned backwards on their shoulders, and they

carry a chain: moreover one must never call them

duppies to their faces, as it gives them power.”

The popular cult of the zombie began shambling

forth in the 1920s, when Jazz Age hipsters turned their

fevered attentions to the West Indies. These slumming

lords and ladies thrilled to scenes of forbidden Obeah

rituals and inspired Hollywood to get into the act. In

1932 the first “voodoo” film, shot in 11 days on a budget

of $50,000, was titled “White Zombie”—once the

zombification of white people occurs, of course, attention

must be paid! Bela Lugosi plays a ghoulish character

who commands an army of the living dead forced to

“work in the sugar mills and the fields at night.”

The Zombie cocktail debuted in 1934 at Don the

Beachcomber’s, an L.A. watering spot, after a customer

reported that he “felt like a zombie” after swilling Don’s

mix of dark, golden, and white rum, cherry brandy,

orange or papaya or pineapple juice, lemon juice, and

grenadine on the rocks. Esquire called the Zombie the

“mother of all freak drinks,” and so it remains, listed on

menus with the campy caution “Limit Two.”

In 1956 my parents vacationed in Jamaica and

brought back maracas and a delightful 78: “Back to

back, belly to belly/ I don’t care a damn, I done dead

a’ready/ Back to back, belly to belly/ It’s a jumbie jamboree

…” The artist listed was The Charmer, backed

by Johnny McCleverty and the Calypso Boys. “The

[Mighty] Charmer” was the stage name of Louis Farrakhan,

ne Louis Eugene Walcott, whose mother had emigrated

from St. Kitts to New York City. The song was

first performed in 1953 by Lord Intruder; its “jumbies”

danced in a Trinidad cemetery, but The Charmer’s 1954

version moved the action to Woodlawn Cemetery in

Brooklyn. The Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte were

among those to cover the tune.

Meanwhile zombies continued their advance as cultural

icon primarily onscreen. No count can be made

of these B- and C- and Z-rated movies—“Zombieland,”

“Kung Fu Zombie,” “Zombie High,” “Zombie Strippers,”

“Zombie Honeymoon,” “Zombie Campout,”

“Zombie Beach Party,” “I, Zombie,” “I Was a Teenage

Zombie,” “I Was a Zombie for the FBI,” “Zombie Holocaust,”

“Zombie Women of Satan,” “Space Zombie

Bingo,” “Redneck Zombies,” “Fast Zombies with Guns,”

“Motocross Zombies from Hell,” “Hot Wax Zombies

on Wheels”—just a splattering of those with the z-word

in the title, which excludes the George Romero, “Evil

Dead,” and “Resident Evil” film franchises, not to mention

AMC’s hit TV series based on Robert Kirkman’s

graphic novel The Walking Dead. There is even a genre

of Nazi-zombie films such as “Zombie Lake,” “Oasis of

the Zombies,” and “Dead Snow.”

From the ’30s and ’40s we have “King of the Zombies,”

“Revolt of the Zombies,” and “I Walked with a

Zombie,” all now considered classics by whoever deems

zombie movies to be classics. But “Valley of the Zombies”

in 1946 may have introduced an innovation: zombie

bloodlust. “Will science triumph against the evil

thirst of the undead?” shrilled the promo.

The original image of the zombie was a biddable,

entranced robotic worker, raised from the grave to labor

without complaint or compensation. Like its more

murderous brethren the Mummy, or the Somnambulist

from “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” this horror tapped

into two of humanity’s deep and historically justified

fears, of being enslaved and of premature burial. The

image of zombies as flesh-eating ghouls—the original

Arabian ghul partook only of the dead—had yet to be

established. But somewhere along the evolutionary line

there appeared a hybrid creature, both cannibal and

undead, bastard offspring of a duppy and a vampire,

with an inborn taste not just blood but human flesh.

(As another forebear, Frankenstein must receive honorable

mention for its versatile monster, at once Golem,

botched abortion, problem child, sin against the Creator,

science project run amok, and renegade zombie.)

If there is anything people fear more than death and

the dead, it is being eaten, especially eaten alive. Eat or

be eaten is the law of nature, and deep down we have

not forgotten. As many have observed, the horror of

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) was not of being

eaten but of the individual being replaced by a soulless,

mass, robotic sameness – the horror of egalitarianism

taken to extremes. The modern zombie apocalypse

goes beyond the terror of conformity to the terror

of consumption. It is a brilliant fusion of two skincrawling

horrors, corpses and being devoured, with

a third—being hunted by your own flesh and blood,

your neighbors and fellow countrymen in

invincible multitudes.

Director George Romero, the godfather of cinematic

zombies, wrote the current narrative with “Night of

the Living Dead,” shot for peanuts in the Pennsylvania

countryside and released in 1968. The elements of the

contemporary zombie are all present: (1) Radiation

bursts from outer space have reanimated the brains of

the unburied dead, (2) making them ravenous for living

human flesh, and (3) stoppable only by a round to

the brain. (4) Their bite infects and zombifies the bitten,

and (5) they are on the move, in revolt as it were—conquering

the world of the living one victim at a time.

Since ’68 the zombie apocalypse storyline has exploded

in all directions. There now exist schools of

zombiology: fast vs. slow zombies, extraterrestrial radiation

vs. earth-borne virus as the etiology of zombification,

all-flesh diet vs. brains only—there is even a lively

debate over whether zombies have souls. Social satire

using the zombie trope began with Romero’s “Dawn of

the Dead” in 1978 and extends from Britain’s “Shaun of

the Dead” to Cuba’s very first entry, “Juan of the Dead.”

The most fun is to be had when the topic is taken

(semi-)seriously. In 2011 the Centers for Disease Control

viewed the zombie apocalypse as a way to teach

pandemic emergency preparedness: “You may laugh

now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read

this…” Survivalists are overjoyed to welcome fans to

their world of “41 Crucial Items You Cannot Survive

Without When the Fight for Food Begins.” Sites like

SurvivalOutpost.com and ChaosPlanning.com paint

a picture of “violent mobs” of “savage beasts” “battling

to the death over a loaf of bread.” Cognitive

neuroscientists have likewise seized the opportunity

to parlay interest in “brains” into interest in their profession—

they playfully posit a Consciousness Deficit

Hypoactivity Disorder to explain zomboid behavior.

The zanily earnest Zombie Research Society (“What

you don’t know can eat you”) dedicates itself to minute

examination of everything from “Zombie Decay

Theory” to “Zombie Hunting Behavior.” And so on.

But do zombies have a basis in fact? Reports of

Haitians buried in a cataleptic states and later revived

for enslavement—for example, the 1980 case

of Clairvius Narcisse—have been credible enough

to prompt several scientific investigations. One of

the best known is that of Wade Davis, a Harvard

ethnobotanist who wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow

in 1985. His quest for zombinol, the “zombie

poison” he hoped might have applications for anesthesia

and prolonged space travel, was actually

successful in isolating several toxins with the property

to yield the results Friar Laurence described in

Romeo and Juliet:

When presently through all thy veins shall run

A cold and drowsy humour; for no pulse

Shall keep his native progress, but surcease;

No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou liv’st;

The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade

To paly ashes, thy eyes’ windows fall

Like death when he shuts up the day of life;

Each part, depriv’d of supple government,

Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death;

And in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death

Thou shalt continue two-and-forty hours,

And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.

Most rich and strange of all zombie references,

though, is this from the website GlobalSecurity.org:

[The] trance-producing potion might seem to be

a creation of the imagination, if it were not for

the fact that many observers of Haiti from early

colonial times down to the early 20th Century

had vouched for the evidences of its use. Such a

poison was necessary to the cannibalistic Voodoo

devotees of slavery days, because slaves, as

valuable chattels, were carefully enumerated. The

chosen victim, usually a child, was dosed with

the poison that brought on a condition simulating

death. The master, satisfied that he had lost

one of his human animals by natural causes,

ordered the burial. Afterwards, the victim was

resuscitated for the sacrifice, since the Voodoo

rites require a living, conscious offering. …

The formula of the poison was obtained at four

widely separated localities in Haiti. The consistent

ingredients included one or more species of

puffer fish (Diodon hystrix, Diodon holacanthus

or Sphoeroides testudineus) which contain tetrodotoxins,

potent neurotoxins fully capable of

pharmacologically inducing the zombi state.

Why GlobalSecurity.org requires a report like

this… maybe we don’t want to know. At any rate, let’s

conclude with a look at what the zombie meme symbolizes

today.

The central horror of the zombie-apocalypse narrative

is that zombies resemble and are your own recently

departed near and dear. That ambivalence has

been present all along, but more and more today the

moral status of the zombie is being probed. If carnivorous

animals can’t be accused of murder when they

kill to eat, why should zombies be, cursed as they

are with the need to cannibalize? Can zombies be

tamed, trained, rehabilitated, even cured? Can they

be taught to eat chicken, or vegetables? The cannibal

history of mankind is revisited here to a disquieting

degree.

Some have explained the zombie-apocalypse phenomenon

as fear of alien invasion or global plague or

even plain old urban anomie. But Max Brooks, author

of World War Z, notes that humans have always had

good reason to fear the horde: huge, human, and hideously

hungry. Right now this horde is our fellow man

in the form of millions faced with starvation in the developing

world. In the age of mass transportation and

communications, they are no longer content to sit and

wait for death. “They” are coming. The real-world images

are haunting: gaunt figures wearing ragged clothing,

disheveled, scrambling over fences and clawing

through tunnels, lurking in the darkness waiting for

a break…

There is never just one meaning to a symbol as

rich as the zombie. People have feared many things

in many different guises over the centuries, but some

fears are eternal and universal. Fear of the dead’s resentment—

survivor guilt—is one enduring terror.

Zombies as Morlocks, have-nots overflowing into

the realms of plenty, tap into our sense that we may

not be able to hold onto our post-industrial advantages

much longer. Is there a remedy for the zombie

apocalypse other than a bullet to the brain? There

had better be. But the narrative so far has failed to

imagine one.