E103 History of the Zombie

Gladio Free Europe

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Brains. Rot. A shambling gait. Everyone knows the tropes that make up zombie, but how did this strange cocktail come to be? Liam and Russian Sam paddle through dark and torrid waters in this week's episode of Gladio Free Europe to chart the origins of the zombie from Afro-Caribbean folklore to today's Hollywood monstrosities.

Possibly the most enduring creature of the classic era of horror cinema, zombies continue to petrify moviegoers in ways that mummies and wolfmen and even vampires do not. But unique among this pantheon of monsters, the zombie is rooted in African religious traditions that crossed into the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade. In fact, the word "zombie" first appears as an appellation of a slave rebel centuries before it was associated with the undead. But by the 19th century, the term reemerged among practitioners of vodou, the unique religion of Haiti that blends Catholicism with traditional West African religions. In the context of vodou, a zombie came to mean the most horrible product of black magic: an empty corpse brought back to life by being filled with the soul of another, always in order to do that person's bidding.

Modern movie zombies have little in common with Haitian folk religion, drawing as much from European stories of ghosts and vampires as from vodou. But elements of vodou and the folk memory of the brutality of slavery survive in unexpected ways in zombie lore. The fear of zombies may be so resilient because they remind us of the brutal domination of man over man. The act of zombification thus represents a fear that lurks in all of our hearts, and a fear that became reality for millions of Africans in the colonial era: that a simple change of fortune could strip of us our will and personhood, and that we could be forced to exist with our humanity stripped away.