Not Your Average Zombie: Rehumanizing the Undead from Voodoo to Zombie Walks

By Chera Kee

A thorough analysis of zombies in popular culture from the 1930s to contemporary society.

The zombie apocalypse hasn’t happened—yet—but zombies are all over popular culture. From movies and TV shows to video games and zombie walks, the undead stalk through our collective fantasies. What is it about zombies that exerts such a powerful fascination? In Not Your Average Zombie, Chera Kee offers an innovative answer by looking at zombies that don’t conform to the stereotypes of mindless slaves or flesh-eating cannibals. Zombies who think, who speak, and who feel love can be sympathetic and even politically powerful, she asserts.

Kee analyzes zombies in popular culture from 1930s depictions of zombies in voodoo rituals to contemporary film and television, comic books, video games, and fan practices such as zombie walks. She discusses how the zombie has embodied our fears of losing the self through slavery and cannibalism and shows how “extra-ordinary” zombies defy that loss of free will by refusing to be dehumanized. By challenging their masters, falling in love, and leading rebellions, “extra-ordinary” zombies become figures of liberation and resistance. Kee also thoroughly investigates how representations of racial and gendered identities in zombie texts offer opportunities for living people to gain agency over their lives. Not Your Average Zombie thus deepens and broadens our understanding of how media producers and consumers take up and use these undead figures to make political interventions in the world of the living.

“Kee provides a compelling synthesis of theory and criticism . . . useful for horror scholars interested in how portrayals of zombie intersect with race and gender.” —Popular Culture Studies Journal

“Kee’s Not Your Average Zombie is an important book . . . Put simply: if it's the one book you read about or cite on zombie, you've made an excellent choice.” —American Quarterly

“[Not Your Average Zombie] offers a fresh theoretical framework to a fast-growing field . . . A fascinating contribution to the critical conversation about the zombie as a fantastic figure.” —Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

“I’m impressed by Kee’s scholarship across several fields—film history and gender and critical race studies, especially—and her cultural and historical contextualizing of the current zombie renaissance.” —James H. Cox, University of Texas at Austin, author of The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781477313190

Book preview

NOT YOUR AVERAGE ZOMBIE

Rehumanizing the Undead from Voodoo to Zombie Walks

CHERA KEE

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2017 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2017

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

http://utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Kee, Chera, author.

Title: Not your average zombie : rehumanizing the undead from voodoo to zombie walks / Chera Kee.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016043282 | ISBN 978-1-4773-1317-6 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1330-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1318-3 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1319-0 (non-library e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Zombies—History—Social aspects. | Zombies—Psychological aspects. | Zombies in motion pictures. | Zombies in literature. | Zombies in popular culture. | Humanity. | Human beings.

Classification: LCC GR581 .K44 2017 | DDC 398.21—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043282

doi:10.7560/313176

For José

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION. From the Zombi to the Zombie: The Extra-Ordinary Undead

PART I. ZOMBIE IDENTITIES

CHAPTER 1. From Cannibals to Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields: Haiti, Vodou, and Early Zombie Films

CHAPTER 2. Racialized and Raceless: Race after Death and Zombie Revolution

CHAPTER 3. You Can’t Hurt Me, You Can’t Destroy Me, You Can’t Control Me: White Women in Zombie Films

CHAPTER 4. A Proud and Powerful Line: Women of Color and Voodoo

PART II. PLAYING THE ZOMBIE

CHAPTER 5. Be Safe, Have Fun, Eat Brains: Playing the Zombie in Video Games

CHAPTER 6. I Walked with a Zombie: Performing the Living Dead

CONCLUSION. I Think I’m Dead.

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I never meant to study zombies, but at a crucial moment early in my career, I turned left instead of right. Thankfully, with that turn I found a supportive community of colleagues, mentors, and friends who encouraged me and gave generously of their time and knowledge—there are not enough words to begin to thank all the people who have provided guidance, encouragement, and, yes, even the occasional zombie-themed toy over the past several years, and I am well aware that I couldn’t have written this book without them.

Starting at the beginning: I must thank my terrific mentors Curtis Marez, Marsha Kinder, and Janet Hoskins, who were there at the earliest stages of this project and who offered invaluable advice and ideas about how to take it further. At the other end of things, in the final few weeks of editing, Maia Butler was of tremendous service as I was revising the manuscript. In the interim, James Cox offered numerous insightful comments that helped me strengthen not only my ideas but also my writing more generally. I only wish he could give me notes on everything I write. I am also indebted to the editorial staff at the University of Texas Press, including Amanda Frost and the ever-gracious Jim Burr, who kindly saw me through the early stages of the publishing process.

At Wayne State University, I have been fortunate to have tremendous institutional support. I was given ample time and resources to research and write this book, including a WSU Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, the Josephine Nevins Keal Faculty Fellowship in the English Department, a grant from the President’s Research Enhancement Program, and a University Research Grant. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to those people who came to my Humanities Center Brown Bag talks on zombies in 2011 and 2012 and who made suggestions and comments on my work in progress. I am also especially indebted to the 2014–2015 WSU Humanities Center Resident Scholars, led by the indomitable Walter Edwards, who helped me think through the bigger picture of my argument and who offered much-needed words of encouragement as I sought out a publisher.

I teach great students every semester, but I would especially like to thank two particular sets of them, without whose conversations this book wouldn’t exist. The students in my first Horror and Zombie class, in 2011, were enthusiastic about the undead and let me bounce ideas off them as I worked through my thoughts on zombies. They were always willing to go with me as we tried to get to the bottom of the question, what is a zombie? Similarly, the students in my 2012 PhD seminar on biopolitics pushed me in productive directions and forced me to reconsider some of my theoretical assumptions about the undead. It was an honor to work with them.

I am further indebted to a number of colleagues who took the time to talk with me, read my work, and hold my hand throughout the book-writing process. I am eternally grateful for my WSU colleagues Alina Cherry, Sharon Lean, Lisa Alexander, Ellen Barton, Steven Shaviro, Julie Klein, Lisa Ze Winters, and Lacey Skorepa, who all contributed their time and insights to help me write a better book. I am in awe of my brilliant friend Jaime Goodrich, whom I truly admire; her notes on one chapter ended up helping reshape the entire book. Tom Fisher chased after zombies with me in Costa Mesa, California, in 2010. Benjamin Han, Courtney White, Dawn Fratini, and Adam Yerima not only lent their time and expertise to my book but also were wonderful friends during this entire process. I am forever grateful for having each of them in my life.

My father, John Kee, has been taking me to the movies since I was a kid, but on one fateful day in 2004, he took me to see a zombie movie and started this whole thing. He has been an unwavering source of encouragement from that moment on.

Finally, this book is dedicated to my husband, José Guzman. Over the years, José has tirelessly and enthusiastically attended zombie walks, watched films, played video games, read drafts, and otherwise made sure that I never gave up on this project. He has always been my biggest cheerleader. José has lived this project as much as I have, and it is as much his book as it is mine. Thank you, José.

INTRODUCTION

FROM THE ZOMBI TO THE ZOMBIE

The Extra-Ordinary Undead

About half the time when I tell someone I study zombies, they wince or instinctively move back—as if I might bite them—and tell me, No, I couldn’t do it. Too scary. I always chuckle at this. Zombies don’t scare me. It could be that after years of watching zombie movies, I have become desensitized, but I think it has something to do with the first zombies I ever saw. It was the early 1980s, and the video for Thriller (Landis, 1983) played twice an hour every hour on MTV. Michael Jackson and his zombies danced across the screen, and they were mesmerizing. I didn’t care that the zombies were decomposing, that their clothes were tattered and torn. It never occurred to me that these creatures were meant to be frightening cannibals. To me, they were just about the coolest things around.

My friends and I were obsessed with Thriller; we knew the song by heart, and soon we knew every move of the dance. At sleepovers, we would push the furniture out of the way so that we could reenact the video over and over again. We didn’t care about the love story that frames the video—we would fast-forward to the good stuff: the dancing. We wanted to be those dancing zombies. I think about that often, how cool the dancing undead of Thriller were, how my first zombies were anything other than what you would expect a zombie to be. Perhaps my childhood identification of zombies as cool wouldn’t have made sense to those more familiar with zombie media, yet in many ways, it was through this portrayal of zombies as dancing creatures that Thriller exposed me to some of the deeper contradictions of the zombie.

Zombies entered the US imaginary as slaves bowing to the will of a zombie master. By the 1970s, zombies in popular culture had become the cannibalistic undead, unthinking adversaries out to eat the living. In either case, the zombie has no free will. Either the zombie is a slave, powerless to resist the control of its master, or it is a cannibal whose will has been subsumed by an animalistic urge to eat. Those are our cultural expectations: zombies as nightmares of loss of control over the self—something most of us wouldn’t want to be. The zombie thus becomes a potent symbol for disenfranchisement and loss of agency. But this symbolism works only if we start from the assumption that zombies, in whatever form, are living beings made over as dead: people who have somehow lost their status as fully human, who have become things. Thought of in this way, zombies should not possess individuality; they should not be able to act freely; they shouldn’t be able to speak; and they certainly shouldn’t be able to dance.

Imagining zombies as dehumanized things is one reason why zombies have become convenient metaphors for any number of contemporary anxieties. They are little more than empty shells, waiting for someone to project fears onto them. Zombie-making cultures, for example, can become threats to American travelers abroad, and cannibal zombies can become shorthand for terrorists or disease. As a former person who has somehow lost their claim to enjoy the full rights of a human being, a zombie is not only something one might fear becoming but also something one might fear will attack. Seemingly pitiless and remorseless, zombies simply act, either on orders from their masters or in response to the drive to eat. The zombie, then, is more a mechanical device than anything else. Its loss of agency corresponds to its loss of the ability to feel (as a human) and its loss of value (as a human).

As voiceless beings without agency, threatening us with attack or conversion, zombies become fascinating figures for considering power relations, master-slave relationships, and unthinking urges to violence, among other things. Many scholars have, in fact, approached zombies in this way, their expectations of zombies paralleling general cultural expectations of zombiness. Frankly, most scholarly work on zombies is less interested in zombies than in the living humans interacting with them, but even in those works more solidly focused on zombies themselves, scholars most often see the zombie as a symbol of something else. Their status as things becomes important because it is much easier to make theoretical arguments about beings seen as devoid of humanity and free will—beings that are practically blank slates—than it is about individual beings who clearly think, act, and love.

American media is full of ordinary zombies that meet our expectations of a mute and impotent victim or an unthinking cannibal, but I have discovered that these aren’t the only zombies running around. Time and again, I found that the zombies imagined in film, television, video games, and literature sometimes wandered into the realm of the humanized individual. Zombies in American media have been the boy next door, the family pet, and the seductive stripper. They have foiled Nazi doctors, kidnappers, and mobsters, and they have helped and even taken care of the living. These zombies may have started in places of total powerlessness, but they often didn’t remain there. What’s more, people are choosing to inhabit the zombie body as self in zombie video games and in events like zombie walks, which would suggest that there is something attractive to trying on the zombie identity.

The somewhat seductive pull of the zombie may have something to do with the fact that US pop culture is full of what I call extra-ordinary zombies, and I mean extra-ordinary in the sense that these zombies go beyond expectations of ordinary zombiness. These zombies may begin in a traditional state of powerlessness, but they gain some sort of agency over their existence and defy our expectations of zombie nature. Extra-ordinary zombies aren’t something new, though. Even in the earliest tales of the zombi in Haiti, there are zombis who overcome their slavery and escape their masters. It should be no surprise, then, that in American media, zombies who somehow refuse to conform to the slave or cannibal characterization are plentiful. While many expected, ordinary zombies wander around American pop culture, there are also zombies who decline to take orders, zombies who fall in love, even zombies who dance.

THE ZOMBI, VODOU, AND HAITI

Zombies are by no means the only undead monsters populating American media, but they are a bit different from their undead brethren. The zombie is one of the few popular Hollywood monsters originating from outside a European literary or folkloric tradition; rather, it arises out of stories connected to Haitian Vodou,¹ and early zombie fiction in the United States owes much to fears of and fascination with Haiti as an independent black republic. While the zombie entered the popular consciousness as a Haitian figure, Kyle William Bishop reminds us the zombie is also a "fundamentally American creation."² Still, it is imperative to keep in mind that even though the zombie is now thoroughly Americanized, its roots lie in Haiti and Vodou.

As we will see in chapter 1, even before the appearance of the zombie, Haiti and Vodou had long captured American and European imaginations. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and the subsequent creation of the Western Hemisphere’s first black republic generated an abundance of curiosity about Haitians and their beliefs. The American occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) rekindled interest in Haiti over a century later. Tales of Haiti, in either century, often centered on its supposedly strange beliefs and barbarism, and when the concept of the zombie entered into the American mainstream, it fit right into a worldview that saw Haiti as a mysterious place full of sorcerers and fiends.

No book on Haiti published before or during the occupation was as influential for the zombie phenomenon as William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929). Seabrook was an explorer who spent time in Haiti and returned to the United States with stories of Vodou—and zombies. The zombie, as Seabrook defined it, was a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life—it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.³ There had been reports of the walking dead before The Magic Island, but Seabrook’s book popularized the zombie as never before.

It may be hard to imagine a world where everyone doesn’t know what a zombie is. Even though stories of zombies have circulated throughout the Western world since before Haiti became a nation—when it was still a part of the French colony of Saint-Domingue—outside academic circles, the idea of the zombie as a dead body returned to life did not really take hold until The Magic Island.⁴ Very quickly after the publication of Seabrook’s account, though, the notion of the zombie as the living dead had become so intertwined with how people thought of Haiti that one couldn’t mention the nation without commenting on zombies, even in nonfiction. In Zora Neale Hurston’s 1938 book Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, she acknowledges: No one can stay in Haiti long without hearing Zombies mentioned in one way or another.⁵ Katherine Dunham, who traveled in Haiti in the late 1930s, also observed that the zombie was ever present: Favorite stories beyond those already discussed were of people believed dead but buried alive, which led to the dead coming to life, which inevitably led to the word which never fails to interest tourists in Haiti, zombies.⁶ Still, the creature that Seabrook imported—and even the one that Hurston and Dunham acknowledged in their work—was not the zombi of Haitian Vodou.

Seabrook’s account didn’t tell the full story. He told of bodies enslaved, but he made no mention of subjugated souls or spirits. Within Vodou belief, there are zombis of the body, which are what Seabrook described, and zombi astral, or zombis of the spirit. Even with these two designations, there are discrepancies and ambiguities. As the folklorists Hans-W. Ackermann and Jeanine Gauthier note, Both the zombi of the body and the zombi of the soul include many sub-types classified either according to their origin or to the mode of zombification; in addition, folktales do not always make clear distinctions between the two main types of zombi.⁷ Ackermann and Gauthier’s research suggests that expectations of finding zombis of the body—or, more to the point, zombis that correspond better to the popular American understanding of the zombie—may often color the presentation of the zombi as it exists in Haitian belief, even in academic circles.

Generally speaking, the two kinds of zombis in Vodou can be characterized as follows: the zombi of the body is a body believed to be dead that someone buries and later resurrects and forces to work, usually on a plantation.⁸ The zombi of the spirit is a little harder to define, but it is generally believed to be a soul that has been separated from its body. Sometimes this means that a soul has been magically enslaved; typically, a houngan (a male Vodou priest), a mambo (a female Vodou priest), or a bokor (sorcerer) has trapped the soul in a bottle so that the power of the soul will work on behalf of the living. Thus, whether a zombi is a zombi astral or a zombi of the body, someone else controls it. For this reason, Hurston is quick to point out that since many associate houngans and mambos with positive or neutral works, and bokors with malevolent practices, zombis could be seen as the sole province of bokors.⁹ Malevolent associations thus become attached to zombi making, and that is, indeed, how many scholars describe the practice. But the processes of zombi making may be a little less clear cut than that. Elizabeth McAlister, in her discussion of zombis of the spirit, notes that "capturing zonbi in order to perform mystical work can be an act of sorcery, but it is also a practice that can be morally benign."¹⁰ There is thus a difference of opinion whether zombi making is inherently sinister.

Still, in the Haitian context, the concept of the zombi—especially the zombi of the body or those zombis of the spirit captured to work for others—and the concept of slavery are intertwined.¹¹ Equating zombis with slavery, though, doesn’t always take into account the complexities of the situation: the lingering specter of slavery in a former colony that has faced numerous outside attempts to undermine its legitimacy as an independent nation means that slavery is not a simple, black-or-white issue in Haiti, but rather provokes a complex set of responses from diverse groups of people. Tales of zombis in Haiti may focus on the loss of free will or some sort of punishment, but they can also speak to rebellion against servitude—as when the zombis wake up. The slavery implied through zombi making in the Vodou tradition is even more complicated, since it is, ostensibly, Haitians enslaving Haitians—and since there are zombis of the body and zombi astral, this may mean anything from real-world Haitians enslaving real-world Haitians to real-world Haitians symbolically enslaving a part of one’s spirit after death.

Because zombis become intertwined with the ways in which many people conceive of Vodou and Haiti, the tendency to associate zombis with slavery (and nothing else) ties these three concepts (Haiti, Vodou, zombi) together in a way that is indicative of an overall victimization.¹² Haiti, Vodou, and zombis become forever powerless in the process. Joan Dayan, however, reads the relationship between zombis and slavery differently. In Haiti, History, and the Gods, she links the concept of zombis to the Haitian revolutionary Jean Zombi and observes that in such a linking, the concept might give former slaves power over their oppressors: Names, gods, and heroes from an oppressive colonial past remained in order to infuse ordinary citizens and devotees with a stubborn sense of independence and survival. The undead zombi, recalled in the name of Jean Zombi, thus became a terrible composite power: slave turned rebel ancestor turned lwa, an incongruous, demonic spirit recognized through dreams, divination, or possession.¹³ Dayan notes that the zombi does not always possess this revolutionary fervor and that the fear of being enslaved, especially during the American occupation, colored local understandings of the zombie.¹⁴ Thus, Dayan still sees slavery as underlying zombi tales, but acknowledges that this interpretation does not mean that the slaves were automatically at a disadvantage.

Therefore, there may be ways to see the zombi as both enslaved and yet still quite powerful. For instance, Rara is a type of Haitian festival music used in street processions—usually occurring during Easter week—and it often has a political flavor to it. McAlister describes how Rara bandleaders capture zombis to harness the energies and talents of the community’s recently dead, and [launch] spiritual and military campaigns with those energies.¹⁵ These zombis offer up protection and strength, so in this conception, a zombi of the spirit, while it may be working for others, is powerful and important to the living community.¹⁶

Even zombi of the body can be powerful. Lawrence W. Levine, writing on African American folk belief, notes that slave magic implied, in part, that the environment did not have to be accepted docilely; it could be manipulated and controlled to some extent.¹⁷ Levine argues that knowledge of this magic proved that there was information outside the purview of white masters, confirming that they weren’t omniscient. If one applies Levine’s arguments to the concept of zombification in Haiti, especially as it may have existed during the colonial era or the US occupation, then knowledge of zombis and zombification granted (and continues to grant) Vodouists a certain amount of political power in the face of French, American, or other outside control. Hence, American occupiers and, later, American moviegoing audiences would naturally fear the zombi/e because deep knowledge of the creature—despite the travelogues and tales about it—still rested in Haitian hands. Thus, the zombi may be a slave, but that does not necessarily make it powerless or unable to act. That is why we should, in thinking about the Americanized zombie, keep in mind the complexities of the Vodou zombi’s slavery and see the strength that can arise out of those complexities.

THE RISE OF THE SLAVE-STYLE ZOMBIE

A push and pull between slavery and agency may be at the heart of how the zombi operates within Vodou belief, but as American media producers took Seabrook’s creature and made it their own in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the zombie wasn’t quite so nuanced. In many ways, it was merely a brand-new bogeyman for audiences to consume. One of the earliest appearances of a zombie in US pop culture was in Kenneth Webb’s 1932 stage play Zombie, which, according to a writer for Time magazine, borrowed liberally from Seabrook in its depiction of the walking dead.¹⁸ The first feature-length zombie film, White Zombie (Halperin, 1932), soon followed, and it too borrowed from Seabrook. These early fictionalizations, based at least in part on Seabrook’s supposedly true tale, helped inaugurate the zombie in American media, and the slave-style zombie rather quickly developed a consistent set of characteristics.

Slave-style zombies arise out of folklore and stories about Haitian Vodou, and their most direct antecedent is Seabrook’s The Magic Island. These zombies are slaves without a will of their own, but despite their roots in stories of Haitian zombis, they may or may not be dead bodies resurrected from the grave—at least as American media have imagined them. Often, they are people who only appear dead. There is always an identifiable cause for zombification in slave-style texts: a magic spell, a potion, a hypnotizing machine, or some other form of mind control. These zombies are under the command of a zombie master. Originally, this master had ties to voodoo, or black magic. As slave-style media moved further and further from the Haitian origins of the zombie, though, the master changed. He (or sometimes she) might be a mad scientist, an alien, or even a communist. What matters is that slave-style zombification is traceable back to a source. Because there is always a clear cause for zombification, someone usually figures out a cure for zombiism or vanquishes the zombie master, reversing the spell and thus freeing their zombified friends.¹⁹

As several scholars have pointed out, because zombies did not come to US popular culture via an already-established literary tradition, nor did they have a long history in Western folklore, US audiences did not have firm expectations when it came to zombies.²⁰ As Peter Haining noted in 1986 when discussing the lack of anthologies of zombie stories in the United States up to that time, Part of the reason for this scarcity of tales about the Walking Undead is no doubt due to the fact that the subject has no great novels to its credit or even famous zombie characters.²¹ Because audiences didn’t know what to