Here's a gem I saw flit by in a random tweet this morning: a recording of author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston discussing zombies and Voodoo during a 1943 radio interview.
"I do know that people have been 'resurrected' in Haiti," she said. "I do not believe that they were actually dead. I believe it was suspended animation. And since there's no embalming there, it's possible; and since people are not buried below ground. They have above-ground vaults as they do in New Orleans. And they take corpses out — it's been proven, there have been cases proven where folks have been dead and folks thought they were done for, and months later somebody finds them somewhere in some hidden place, actually alive, but without their minds."
Hurston claimed to be the first person to ever photograph a zombie. Her photo of Felicia Felix-Mentor, a Haitian woman who was buried in 1907 and found 29 years later, dazed and naked, wandering the countryside, was published in Life magazine and helped popularize the concept of zombies in America. Hurston went into more detail on the case, as well as her theory that "zombification" (my word, not hers) is a drug-induced state, not a real instance of death and resurrection, in her 1937 book Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica.
Read more:
• The Z-Word: On Zombies and Popular Culture
• The Zombie in/as the Text: Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse
• Got Brains? Mark Harris's Top 30 Zombie Movies
Comments
The concept of zombies was actually introduced to the American public by Hollywood with the feature film “White Zombie.” Starred Bela Lugosi as the evil zombie master.
Right you are, TexasBrit. I have rephrased my statement to say Hurston’s work helped popularize zombies in the U.S. Thanks!