Zombies Are Real: The Haitian and American Realities Behind the Myth
film
Short, non-fiction film for the Center for African and African American Research at Duke University documents the Haitian origins and the US American transformation of the concept of the zombie. Zombies are real. In Haiti, zonbi (the term in Haitian Kweyòl) are ensorcelled people or spirits exhumed from the grave. They dramatically illustrate the Haitian notion that life is not individual but is constituted by the co-presence of one’s ancestral family spirits in one’s person and in one’s family home. Conversely, the most fearsome kind of death is abandonment by those spirits, the posthumous neglect of one’s spirit by one’s descendants, and/or the capture of one’s soul by a selfish stranger. The zombie first appeared in US American books and films during the US occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), drawing its inspiration from the exaggerated reports of US Marines. But the zombie has now become a billion-dollar entertainment industry. Within US American culture, the zombie has become a potent metaphor for a changing variety of social ills, ranging from sexual exploitation, exploitative capitalism, communist infiltration, and other ways of losing self-control to consumerism, third-world poverty and immigration, loneliness, and pandemic disease.
Duke Scholars
Cited Collaborators
- J. Lorand Matory
Commissioned By
Cited Collaborators
- J. Lorand Matory