The Zombie Legend: Haitian Voodoo or Hollywood Horror?

The monster that haunts our modern world is an invention. The shuffling, ravenous horde we see on our screens is a pale shadow of an older, more human terror. Before the apocalypse, before the monster, there was the zonbi, a creature born not of plague, but of the deep horror of slavery. This is the story of how that tragic figure was stolen, and how its name was given to a monster that would conquer the globe.

This documentary is a deep-dive into the entire, shocking history of the living dead. We will journey to the sugar plantations of colonial Haiti to uncover the true meaning of the soulless victim. We will explore the complex metaphysics of Voodoo, the pharmacology of the sorcerer's poison, and the true story of Clairvius Narcisse, the man who went to his own funeral. Then, we travel to the grindhouse theaters of the 1960s, where George A. Romero accidentally created a new mythology of the flesh-eating ghoul, and track its evolution from a tool of social satire into a multi-billion dollar pop-culture phenomenon.

Ultimately, the zombie is a mirror. It is a blank slate onto which we project our most pressing fears: the loss of self, the terror of the mob, the anxiety of a world-ending plague, and the dark possibility that the most dangerous monster has always been us.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro
00:00:33 Haiti & The Code Noir: The Origins of the Zombie
00:08:12 Haitian Vodou Explained: The Metaphysics of the Soul
00:23:38 The Real Zonbi: Clairvius Narcisse & The Bokor's Poison
00:38:11 White Zombie (1932): The First Zombie Movie
00:50:12 George A. Romero's Revolution: Night of the Living Dead (1968)
01:05:44 Dawn of the Dead: The Zombie Apocalypse Rules are Written
01:16:24 The Origin of "Brains!": Return of the Living Dead (1985)
01:19:29 The Running Zombie: 28 Days Later & The Rage Virus
01:29:09 World War Z & The Walking Dead: The Apocalypse Becomes a Genre
01:47:53 Resident Evil & The Last of Us: The Zombie in Video Games
01:58:02 Analysis: What Our Zombies Say About Us (The Four Fears)

Music used:
"Long Note Four" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Music has been edited.
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...

#Zombies #Folklore #Documentary