When There's No More Room In Hispaniola...
Sep. 3rd, 2012 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenBeen doing research for my thesis on the American occupation of Haiti. One thing that struck me was noticing that, as late as the 1920s, ‘Zombies’ were still unknown in America – a fair number of writers, talking about superstition in Haiti, seem to think zombie is a type of ghost.
It’s weird to realise zombies have only been part of English-speaking pop culture for less than a century. They don’t feel that recent – zombies feel perfectly at home in medieval European-style fantasies, they don’t feel like foreign intruders like monsters from middle-eastern or Asian folklore would. They’ve certainly lost any specific connection to Voodoo or Caribbean culture.
Then again, most of the modern ideas about Vampires and Werewolves entered popular culture through film at about the same time; the 1930s was a remarkably influential era for horror. One wonders if the Zombie would have gone on to have the same impact had the early film industry developed in another country, or if the United States hadn’t been occupying Haiti at the time the industry was looking for new supernatural beasts…
It’s weird to realise zombies have only been part of English-speaking pop culture for less than a century. They don’t feel that recent – zombies feel perfectly at home in medieval European-style fantasies, they don’t feel like foreign intruders like monsters from middle-eastern or Asian folklore would. They’ve certainly lost any specific connection to Voodoo or Caribbean culture.
Then again, most of the modern ideas about Vampires and Werewolves entered popular culture through film at about the same time; the 1930s was a remarkably influential era for horror. One wonders if the Zombie would have gone on to have the same impact had the early film industry developed in another country, or if the United States hadn’t been occupying Haiti at the time the industry was looking for new supernatural beasts…