Zombies (Primer for 28 Days Later)

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Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one.

In advance of our coverage of Danny Boyle's Revivifying 28 Days Later, we've put together a little primer on zombies.

Today we'll explore the origins of the word, its mythology, and Hollywood lineage.

I hope you find it as informative and entertaining as I did researching it.

As always, if you have a correction or any additional insights into any of the films that we cover, send us a note at whatwentwrongpod at gmail.com.

Without further ado, I give you zombies.

On September 10th, 2024, former Vice President Kamala Harris and former and now current President Donald Trump sparred in their first and sole presidential debate.

Now, this is not a show about politics, but this televised event yielded an unusual proclamation from the president about an alleged outbreak of sorts taking place in the Midwest.

In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in.

They're eating the cats.

They're eating the pets of the people that live there.

And this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame.

These assertions that Haitian migrants were eating local pets were quickly proven false.

They were the result of a conspiratorial social media post which stemmed from racial tensions in a small town, coupled with an unrelated case from Canton, Ohio, in which a 27-year-old U.S.-born woman was arrested on charges she killed and ate a cat.

The world moved on, but the fear-mongering lingered, and a very particular word stumbled around the back of my mind.

Zombies.

Don't say that.

What?

That?

What?

That's the Z word.

Don't say it.

Why not?

Because it's ridiculous.

Alright.

Before they were fast, before they were a metaphor for consumerism, slackers, or emotional emotional numbness, before they were tied to radiation, meteors, or viral contagions, zombies were part of a very specific spiritual tradition.

And they were born in Haiti.

Haiti was originally populated by the Taino people.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus established the first European settlement in the Americas on Haiti's northeastern coast, La Navidad.

The island, then called Hispaniola, was decimated by the diseases that the Europeans brought.

Labor was needed, it was trafficked from West Africa.

In 1681, it's estimated that there were roughly 2,000 slaves in Spain's Haitian colony.

By the late 18th century, San Domanga, as it had been renamed by the French, was the most lucrative colony in the entire world, supported entirely by slave labor.

The slave trade was a cross-Atlantic web of horrors, death, disease, abuse, and the destruction of culture and belief.

In 1685, King Louis XIV's Code Noir ordered every enslaved person baptized and forbade any public exercise of non-Catholic worship.

West African slaves hid their spirits behind Catholic saints and held rites at night.

The Haitian diasporic religion known as voodoo was more than folklore.

It was rebellion.

Likely stemming from West African words nzambi or zumbi, meaning spirit or deity, the zombies of Haiti were, much as they are today, representative of a loss of control.

It was believed that those who died from unnatural causes like murder would linger at their graves.

The corpses in this limbo state were vulnerable to resurrection by a witch doctor or bakor.

Upon reanimating, the formerly deceased would have no agency.

They would be the personal slave of the bakor.

They were neither dead nor alive.

Haiti achieved independence in 1804 after a brutal and bloody 13-year struggle.

It became the first free black republic in the world.

But freedom came at an immense cost.

Quarantine.

Empires were leery of slave revolts spreading.

Haiti was a threat to Western imperialism and the economic engines powered by forced labor.

Haiti was embargoed and eventually extorted by France to the tune of 150 million francs, roughly three years of Haiti's GDP, to compensate former plantation owners for the loss of their slaves.

Haiti, facing down warships and cannons, took out high-interest loans from French banks to pay.

As much as 70% of government revenue in the late 19th century went to servicing this debt.

Despite its independence, Haiti effectively lived under the control of a picor, unable to invest in itself.

Roads, schools, industrialization, all sacrificed in the name of feeding the zombie debt owed owed its former master.

Under President Lincoln, the U.S.

recognized Haiti in 1862, not so much to help them with their problems, but to see if they could help Lincoln with his.

He wanted to trial run his plan to ship newly freed American slaves back to Africa on a small island off the coast of Haiti.

Fifty years of uneasy interaction and resistance at becoming a de facto American base, a fate suffered by its neighbor, Puerto Rico, during the Spanish-American War, culminated in the brief rule of Vilbron Guillaume Sam, Haiti's fifth president in his many years.

Facing an insurgent army and convinced he was on the verge of being overthrown, Sam ordered the execution of 167 political prisoners jailed in the national penitentiary, including former President Emmanuel Oreste Zamour.

They were murdered in their cells by firing squads.

Sam fled to the French embassy.

The rebels broke down the doors.

He was dragged into the street and pulled apart, limb by limb.

On July 28, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Navy to land at force on the island.

330 Marines were on the beach by nightfall, inaugurating what would become a two-decade occupation.

Haitians were presented as incapable of self-governance, savages, mindless beasts,

zombies.

As R.B.

Davis Jr., Secretary of Legation, wrote to the Secretary of State on January 12, 1916, at the time of the arrival of Rear Admiral W.B.

Caperton aboard the USS Washington, the head of President Sam was being carried on a pole through the city, and what remained of his body was being dragged through the streets by a mob, mad from the sight of blood.

Mob law held sway, jeopardizing the lives and property of foreigners.

Humanitarian language acted as a cover for commercial, strategic, and racially paternalistic goals.

In 1935, Marine Corps General Smedley Butler confessed to the newspaper Common Sense that he had spent three decades as a high-class muscle man for big business and a gangster for capitalism.

Quote, I helped make Haiti a decent place for the national citibank boys.

But author William Seabrook wasn't interested in decency.

Seabrook was many things.

He was a traveler, journalist, ambulance driver, cannibal, more on that in a moment, and veteran.

He survived the Battle of Verdun, the longest and largest battle of World War I, and a gas attack, returned to the United States, and began reporting for the New York Times.

But he had a dark side.

He was likely an alcoholic, he was obsessed with the occult, and he had even entertained Alistair Crowley in 1919.

He traveled to West Africa in the 1920s, came across a tribe with a taste for human flesh, and then took a nibble himself back at the Sorbonne after convincing a medical intern to give him a slice of cadaver on the sly.

Quote, it was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef, end quote.

We will take your word for it, Willie.

Seabrook needed a subject for his next travel book, a follow-up to adventures in Arabia and his dalliance with Bedouin mystics.

He needed voodoo.

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Seabrook flew to Haiti in late 1927, leveraging connections in the U.S.

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 plodding 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 zombie, 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 U.S.

occupation of Haiti.

The film follows 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 Bella Lugosi, to drug Madeline 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 sub-genre, 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 Altermann 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 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 U.S.

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, 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 16mm 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 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 zombies.

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 same year that would infect the masses worldwide.

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-asque 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.

I love people as I meet them one by one.

People are just wonderful as individuals.

You see the whole universe in their eyes if you look carefully.

But as soon as they begin to group, as soon as they begin to clot, when there are five of them or ten or even groups as small as two, they begin to change.

They sacrifice the beauty of the individual for the sake of the group.

Or as Nietzsche put it, in individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.

We hope you guys have enjoyed this primer on zombies.

If you have a correction, feel free to send it in to whatwentwrongpod at gmail.com, and we look forward to chatting all things 28 days later on Monday.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast.

This episode was presented by Chris Winterbauer, with post-production and music by David Bowman.