Zombies have become a pretty major part of the horror genre. The first zombie movie, “White Zombie,” was released all the way back in 1932, but they first really took a bite out of our subconscious with George Romero‘s “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968. Since then, their popularity has exploded, with more zombie movies, TV shows, and books than you could shake a stick at. But where did the idea of zombies really come from?
It turns out that zombies have their origins in Haitian Vodou (more commonly known as voodoo). Unlike its cousin hoodoo, practiced in New Orleans as a kind of mixture of folk medicine and superstition, Vodou is a complex diaspora faith borne of West African religions. In Vodou, a zombi is someone put under the control of another through the use of psychedelic plants, a nightmarish concept documented in anthropological texts like “Tell My Horse…
