Let There Be Zombies!

by Serena

From the video games to movies, zombies, or the living dead, have become a part of mainstream American society mainly due to George A. Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead. The typical member of the undead is characterized by a mindless animated corpse determined to kill and eat the flesh of all living human beings nearby. Typically, they walk slowly and position their arms parallel to the floor, similar to that of sleep walkers’. Although in recent times, the new generation living dead are armed with machine guns, zombies old and new all share the same origin: West African voodoo. In the West African spiritual belief of voodoo, witch doctors, or bokor, are believed to be able to revive the dead and control them. However fanciful this belief seems, it is very much real: there are zombies walking this earth as we speak.

In 1982, Wade Davis made a trip to Haiti to investigate the folk preparations that supposedly creates zombies. He later published a book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, on his discoveries, documenting the story of an ex-zombie, Clarivius Narcisse. Narcisse spent eighteen years being drugged and enslaved to do field work while in a semi-conscious, “zombie” state with several others, claiming it to be the work of a Haitian bokor. Davis’ findings detail the process of making creating a “zombie” or drugged, mentally handicapped captive:

The process typically does not involve a shovel and a spell book to raise the dead to life; a fish, plant leaves and an unsuspecting victim are all the necessary ingredients to make a zombie. The victim is first paralyzed by teterodotoxin, a poison from a puffer fish that “fakes death.” It serves to block sodium channels in the nerves, causing paralysis and lowering metabolism, which causes a death like state. Upon being declared dead and buried, the body is unearth and lathered in a chemical paste made of datura, a dissociative drug that makes victims unable to differentiate fantasy from reality and wipes their memories clean of recent events. The effects of datura lasts for several days and victims are easily susceptible to outside forces or pressures in that time. It is unclear how long a human is able to survive under the effects, although it appears to be several years in the case of Narcisse; he reportedly wandered sixteen years in a trance from the drug before it completely cleared his system.

Although not actually rising from the dead, these drugged, mentally unstable captives as close to Hollywood zombies that reality is going to get. However, being human and under the influence of dissociative drugs, it is unlikely they are plotting to eat your brains or planning the next zombie apocalypse in time for 2012. Whatever the case, beware of shady characters carrying puffer fish and plant paste in the alley ways: you never know when you’ll be the next zombie victim.

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Speigel, L. (2010). How to make a zombie, haiti-style. Aol News, Retrieved from http://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/article/how-to-make-a-zombie-haiti-style/19638134

Freye, E. (2009). Pharmacology and abuse of cocaine, amphetamines, ecstasy and related designer drugs. New York, NY: Springer.