*Blog from mythology.com

It’s close to midnight and something evil’s lurking in the dark, under the moonlight you see a sight that almost stops your heart, you try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it, you start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes…

That unsettling scenario, courtesy of one of the most frightening human beings ever – Michael Jackson – pretty much sums up how we think of Zombies. But, long before George Romero (Night of The Living Dead) reinvented and set the standard for the concept, Zombies were a chilling and intriguing aspect of Voodoo.

Voodoo is often practiced in Haiti, among other places. It is an amalgamation of African beliefs, brought to the island by the slaves, and Christian elements, from the European settlers who brought them there. The vast majority of Voodoo adherents practice “white magic,” contrary to the images we get from TV and movies. Remember the Voodoo doll from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” – well, it’s not like that at all.

However, they do believe in zombification. It is thought that the victim is overcome with a spell or potion that causes them to die. Once dead, they rise as a mindless drone completely at the will of their master. Movie wise, and to the chagrin of intelligent people everywhere, this is actually more like “Weekend at Bernie’s.”

The idea made it into popular culture in the early twentieth century. In 1929, William B. Seabrook wrote, in reference to seeing a Haitian Zombie: “The eyes were the worst. It was not my imagination. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing. The whole face, for that matter, was bad enough. It was vacant, as if there was nothing behind it. It seemed not only expressionless, but incapable of expression.”

The truth of Zombies as slaves is definitely a far cry from the festering, walking dead that we know and love from films like Lucio Fulci’s “Zombie.” They are definitely not as scary as a moaning corpse trying to eat your brain, but they do have their moments. It was rumored that Haitian dictator, Papa Doc Duvallier had his own personal army of zombies. Hmmm, a power-hungry tyrant, on an island, with a militia of undead automatons bending to his every whim, now that’s a movie I’d like to see.