Chris Winterbauer (15:31)
Seabrook flew to Haiti in late 1927, leveraging connections in the US military to investigate voodoo mysteries, loa spirits and the thing called the zombie. He was taken to the Haitian American Sugar Company and introduced to four such specimens. As he later recounted, quote the supposed zombies continued dumbly at work. They were plotting like brutes, like automatons. The eyes were the worst. They were, in truth, like the eyes of a dead man. Not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing. Of course, what Seabrook was actually witnessing was almost certainly an illegal form of slave labor agricultural workers or sharecroppers who were malnourished, exhausted, working 18 hour days for near non existent wages, and possibly in some instances mentally impaired or drugged. As Seabrook himself went on to callously write, the zombies were nothing but poor, ordinary, demented human beings, idiots forced to toil in the fields. It's important to note that at this point in time, the 1920s idiot was actually a commonly used medical term to refer to someone with stunted mental development. Seabrook's explorations of Haiti, voodoo and witchcraft were published in his 1929 book the Magic Island. The chapter on the dead men working in the cane fields brought the concept of the undead to the English mainstream, and Seabrook's timing couldn't have been better. The early 1930s were monstrous on screen, that is pre code horror films like Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Mummy and the Invisible man swept the nation. And though it's often forgotten now, there was a notable independent feature called White Zombie, directed by Victor Halperin. Loosely based on the Magic island and Kenneth Webb's Broadway play Zombie, it was released at the end of the US Occupation of Haiti. The film follows a newly engaged white couple, Madeline and Neil Parker, who visit Haiti, where they aim to be wed. Unfortunately, she draws the eye of a plantation owner who enlists the help of a white Haitian voodoo master, Murder Legendre played by Bela Lugosi, to drug Madeleine and revive her as a glass eyed, obedient white Zombie. Now, White Zombie was a financial success and a critical failure, and it looks little like the zombie films we've grown accustomed to. It was also briefly a lost film, rediscovered in the 1960s, but it touched off a new horror subgenre, and zombies permeated American consciousness as a vehicle for fears of voodooism, blackness and even Haiti as a primitive world of savagery and magic. More such films followed. Awanga, King of the Zombies I Walked with the Zombies, Voodoo Man. We even had our first Nazi zombies in 1943's Revenge of the Zombies, in which John Carradine's mad scientist Dr. Max Heinrich von Alterman tries to create an army of the living dead for Hitler. As World War II drew to a close, American fears were shifting and zombies were adapting. Alarmed at the rapid expansion of totalitarian interests in Europe and Asia, President Truman addresses a joint session of Congress on our changing foreign policy. The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedom. Fear of a loss of control spread through the abstract idea of communism, the very tangible effects of the nuclear bomb, and even threats overhead with the space race. In 1947, the Catholic Catechetical Guild Educational Society of St. Paul, Minnesota published Is this Tomorrow? A truly outlandish bit of pulp propaganda aimed at revealing how communism could and would infect America by way of lefty suckers, Hollywood moles and treacherous labor unions. I raise this dubious and minor footnote in American history for two reasons. One, it's one of the earliest published works to include the art of Charles M. Schultz, who would go on to create Peanuts. Two, it presented an American populace hypnotized by Soviet sleeper agents and coded messages, and may have directly inspired one of the first zombies as communist stories in America. Corpses coast to coast, published in 1954, this comic strip kicks things off with gravediggers unionizing and going on strike, noticing a theme here causing a surplus of unburied corpses to build up exactly what a Soviet communist needs. Plot twist, he was behind the strike the whole time. The corpses are mutated into zombies organized under the United World Zombies banner, raised like an army and threatened to take over the world only to be stopped by an atomic bomb. As the Soviet mastermind decries at the end of the comic strip, zombie tissue doesn't stand up well under blast and radiation, but what if it could? 1955 featured creature with an atom brain where an ex Nazi scientist shoots up corpses with atomic energy and Then radio controls them to smash America's post war prosperity. Teenage Zombies, released in 1959 is perhaps best described as Red dawn meets the island of Dr. Moreau. Only not nearly as fun as that should be. And it features a group of teens foiling the east backed mad scientist Dr. Myra from gassing the US population into a state of mindless zombie submissiveness. 1959 also featured Invisible Invaders, which of course starred invisible radioactive aliens who could possess and reanimate the dead. But the aliens weren't always of ill intent. In Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood's golden turkey masterpiece of so Bad it's Good legend, extraterrestrials seek to prevent humans from developing a bomb that they could destroy the universe with and resurrect Earth's dead to do so. Haitian zombies, Nazi zombies, Soviet Communist zombies, alien zombies, even guerrilla Zombies. By the 1960s, America needed something different. It was time for American zombies. George Romero's Night of the Living Dead never actually uses the term zombie. The shuffling corpses in the film are referred to as ghouls, and the title of the film was originally Night of Anubis, then Night of the Flesh Eaters, and finally the at the demand of the distributor, Night of the Living Dead. Although radiation still hangs over the story, it's theorized on the radio that a returning space probe from Venus might be responsible for the horrific reanimations. These zombies served no master. They were simply the horde. Night of the Living Dead was as revolutionary politically and narratively as it was rudimentary. Cinematically, it was shot on 16 millimeter black and white film with music largely pulled from existing movies. But it was shockingly violent and it held a not so subtle mirror up to American audiences. Here was a black protagonist, actor Dwayne Jones, surviving the zombie mob, only to be gunned down at the end of the film by a white rural posse in an incredibly bleak finale. The film evoked civil rights iconography, the Vietnam War and the long hot summer riots of 1967. A line was drawn. The zombies were no longer them, they were us. And even though the genre returned to the Caribbean from time to time with the likes of Lucio Fulci's Zombie 2 and Wes Craven's the Serpent and the Rainbow, its most popular incarnations remained decidedly American consumers at the end of capitalism. In Romero's follow up dawn of the Dead, second fiddle to the true terrors of the military industrial complex. In his third installment, Day of the Dead, Romero had also popularized the first and most important rule of dealing with destroy the brain or remove the head. The 80s featured the first fast zombies, Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City or City of the Walking Dead, unkillable zombies, Dan o' Bannon's punk splatter comedy the Return of the Living Dead, and even talking zombies in both Return and to a far lesser extent, Romero's Day of the Dead. But by the early 1990s, the cycle had cooled. Video store shelves sagged with the VHS copies of low budget sequels which were always popular. But mainstream cinema seemed to have wrung the last metaphorical drop from this shambling horde. What fears were left to exploit? In 1996, Capcom released Resident Evil, a landmark survival horror game that focused seven decades of stories built around test tube resurrections into a tale of corporate greed run amok. Gone were voodoo curses and cosmic radiation. In their place stood the T virus, a patented bioweapon created by the Umbrella Corporation, a catch all for 90s anxieties about big pharma cloning and deregulated biotech. These zombies weren't supernatural, they weren't political. They were merely the bottom line. Paul W.S. anderson's 2002 adaptation of the game Resident Evil translated the lab breach to the big screen. But it was of course, Danny Boyle's 28 days later that came out that same year that would infect the masses worldwide. Hello? Hello. The road from Raccoon City to deserted London streets completed the zombie genre's pivot from Cold War parable to post genomic nightmare. Zombies were no longer symbols of slow social decay. They were harbingers of 21st century lightning fast scientific progress without oversight. As I put together this primer, I wondered why zombies are so enduringly frightening. Is it their near invulnerability? Their rabies esque bite? The state of decay? Is it the fact that they always seem to reveal in the third act that the real monsters aren't the zombies at all? I don't think so. At first, I concluded, with respect to Dan o', Bannon, it's the fact that they cannot speak. There's no reasoning with them, there's no humanity left to appeal to. And there is something truly terrifying about being faced by someone you can't communicate with. But then I came across an interview with George Carlin that convinced me otherwise.
