William Seabrook: the man who brought zombies ashore

In 1929, he published The Magic Island, an account of a trip to Haiti in which he pursued his usual interests: initiation into ‘native’ rituals, drinking blood, feeling the authentic power of the savage gods. Chapter 13 was entitled ‘Dead Men Working in Cane Fields’. The Creole word zombi had appeared in US writing since the 1880s, but Seabrook took the credit for Americanising the term:

The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanise it into movement, and then make of it a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habitation or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.

Seabrook was astounded when his informant told him that there were zombies at work in the plantations of the Haitian-American Sugar Corporation. ‘I did see these “walking dead men”,’ Seabrook writes, ‘and I did, in a sense, believe in them and pitied them.’ Finding three ‘dead’ Haitians at work, he experiences ‘mental panic’, only to decide that they are ‘nothing but poor ordinary demented human beings, idiots, forced to toil in the fields’. The American occupiers were reinstating plantations and forcing peasants back to work in them in the name of modernity.

The Magic Island was a direct influence on White Zombie, the 1932 film that began the career of the category of the undead that now dominates contemporary horror.