One of Amazon’s best-selling Halloween getups this season is a deluxe zombie costume. Designed for boys ages 3 to 16, it features a tattered shirt that reveals the zombie’s plastic bones, and a hood over a skeletal mask. An ax is included.
The costume represents the zombies we know from movies and TV: scary creatures that used to be dead people and have come back to life. Yet according to a new exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, “Zombies: Death Is Not the End?” (through Feb. 16, 2025), that representation is a distortion.
Zombies are actually a group of people in present-day Haiti who number around 50,000 and who were never dead, the exhibition explains. Many of them were, rather, subjected to a form of religious punishment known as zombification: drugged, buried alive, then exhumed in a state of stupor, and enslaved.
The Western notion of the zombie as a resurrected corpse is a fantasy propagated by Western popular culture, the show’s curators argue, devoting an entire section to the movies, music, comic books and novels that have kept that fantasy alive.
The West’s enduring zombie myth “has long served to mock, stigmatize and lampoon Haitian culture,” said Philippe Charlier, the exhibition’s lead curator. “It’s unfair, and it’s wrong.”
Charlier, an anthropologist and archaeologist, mentioned the example of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, in which the dead are seen climbing out of their graves. He said the Quai Branly show aimed to “stop these clichés, these stereotypes, these caricatures of Voodoo culture in general and of Haiti in particular.”
That won’t be easy. Some 600 zombie movies have been released since 1920, more than half of them in the 21st century, according to the 2017 book “Zombies in Western Culture.” They include “World War Z” (2013) starring Brad Pitt, which grossed over $500 million.
To deconstruct Western zombie tropes that often depict Voodoo as a form of witchcraft, the exhibition begins by introducing visitors to the Voodoo religion that is practiced today by a majority of Haitians.
Visitors see the reconstituted temple of a Voodoo priest, Erol Josué, who is one of the exhibition curators. Inside, clay pots, metal amulets, figurines and framed images surround a bright red central pole, or “poteau mitan,” which symbolizes the ties between the living, the dead and the gods.
In an interview, Josué explained that zombification was a form of “parallel justice” that was meted out in the Haitian mountains and countryside to individuals who had committed crimes such as rape or the theft of someone else’s land but had gone unpunished by the justice system.
He said “corrupt lawyers and judges” in Haiti sometimes granted land owned by a farmer to a third party. The wronged farmer would then appeal to a parallel court because, Josué explained, in the Haitian culture, land is considered sacred: For descendants of enslaved people, “giving up your land means giving up your freedom.”
Once a person is targeted for zombification, powders and poisons derived from plants and animals are secretly applied to their undergarments or shoes, so that the toxins penetrate the victim’s skin, Charlier, who is also a medical doctor, said.
Hours after contact with the poison, the person’s heart slows almost to a standstill and they seem to have stopped breathing. At this stage, they are pronounced dead — and buried, Charlier said. At nightfall, a sorcerer opens their grave and coffin and takes them to a faraway place where they’re forced into servitude. Salt deprivation and psychotropic drugs then keep them in a vegetative state, he said.
These real-life zombies are documented in the exhibition through photographs and videos. They include records of Clairvius Narcisse, who was pronounced dead in a hospital in 1962, then reappeared 18 years later. Narcisse spoke of having been exhumed and enslaved by a “bokor,” or sorcerer, before escaping.
Narcisse had been found guilty of selling a plot of land he didn’t own, but plenty of other people are zombified for no reason, by sorcerers acting on behalf of the enemies of the victim, Charlier said. (The 50,000 or so people referred to as zombies in Haiti today also include people who were never zombified, such as those who suffer from a particular psychiatric disorder, he added.)
Zombification is conducted by secret societies in Haiti, chiefly the Bizango, who summon the victim for hearings in tribunals filled with large dolls and effigies that represent judges and are designed to intimidate the victim. An ensemble of these objects, on loan from several Haitian sanctuaries, is displayed in a dim enclosure in the show. Covered in red and black fabric, they’re made of bottles, cow horns, toys, human skulls and glass shards.
In the West, zombies began to pop up in books starting in the 17th century, and in Hollywood movies from the 1930s. When George Romero’s black-and-white “Night of the Living Dead” was released in 1968, zombies become an international phenomenon. In the movie’s ominous trailer (one of several trailers screened in the exhibition), creatures with bulbous eyes feed on humans as the voice-over roars: “The dead who live on living flesh. The dead whose haunted souls hunt the living.”
Romero “takes the Western vampire and turns it into something gory and disgusting that causes death through bites or direct contact,” said Charlier. “That doesn’t exist in Haiti. If a Haitian zombie bites you or touches you, nothing happens to you.”
Outside the screening room are comic-book covers from the “Walking Dead” series, in which gun-wielding men prepare to fight resuscitated corpses, and from a Marvel zombie comic that shows a human eyeball dangling from the mouth of a flesh-eating hulk.
Nearby is the cover of Iron Maiden’s 1985 “Live After Death” album, designed by Derek Riggs, with a shackled monster breaking out of its stone grave.
A concluding section of the show traces the evolution of the word “zombie” back to its roots in the word “nzambi” in sub-Saharan Africa. That word, meaning spirit without body, refers to a dead child. It was redefined in Haiti, via the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as a body without a spirit, and it was later altered again by Hollywood and in Western popular culture.
Charlier noted that now the zombie is appearing as a figure in the flourishing film and television industry in Central and West Africa as well as Haiti.
“Having gone around the world and changed meaning,” said Charlier, “the zombie may well, in 20 or 50 years’ time, recover its original meaning.”
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