The original opening for this article was going to be: “Not too long ago, zombies were everywhere.” Then, upon reflection, I realized that the halcyon days of zombie media were in the years immediately following September 11th. Boy, do I feel old now. You can start sending me checks anytime, Social Security.
From 2002, with the release of the groundbreaking 28 Days Later, to 2010, when The Walking Dead became a major hit in its first season, zombies were at their apex. Zombie video games, zombie comics, and zombie-infused novels could not be avoided. Until comic book movies by Marvel and DC kicked the shambling dead out of the cineplex, zombies were the only larger-than-life creatures deemed worthy of interest by the masses. Now, twenty to twelve years later, the zombie craze has passed. Sure, some permutation of The Walking Dead may still be on TV. And yes, there are still full-grown adults participating in zombie walks or decorating their Jeeps to mimic the combat cars of a future zombie apocalypse. These bitter-enders may never give up on their favorite brain-eaters, and God bless them for it.
As interesting as the zombie collapse is, what with its warnings about oversaturation and the cyclical nature of horror cinema, the origins of the zombie craze are just as captivating. For, despite what you may believe, interest in cannibal corpses did not begin with George A. Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead (1968). Hollywood’s was long-versed in zombie mythology by 1968—films such as White Zombie (1932), King of the Zombies (1941), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) all played to packed houses, even during the height of World War II. However, unlike Romero’s cannon, these films always connected zombies with their folkloric roots in Haiti and the religious practices of voodoo. (An interesting exception is the 1936 film, Revolt of the Zombies, which concerns Khmer black magic and takes place in French Indochina.) Romero and almost all subsequent zombie films and books extracted the magical elements of zombification and replaced them with rationalist materialism (i.e., viruses, contagions, nuclear fallout, etc.).
Before the first zombie walked across the silver screen, when most in the Western world had no idea what a “zombie” was, the creature featured heavily in the pulps and pulp-adjacent literature. Two men in particular, Weird Tales favorite Henry S. Whitehead and adventure journalist William Seabrook, did much to expose the zombie and its mythology to the world beyond the Caribbean.
Henry St. Clair Whitehead (1882-1932) was born just outside of New York City in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Whitehead must have come from wealth. After all, he attended Harvard University, graduating in 1904 alongside future president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Whitehead played football in college, which helped him to land a job as the athletics commissioner for the Amateur Athletics Union (AAU). Once he retired his cleats, Whitehead pursued a different calling in the service of the Lord. He graduated from Berkeley Divinity School and became an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church. As a deacon, clergyman, and rector of the Episcopal faith, Whitehead tended to Jesus’s flock in Connecticut, Florida, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. From 1921 until 1929, Whitehead lived on the island of Saint Croix during the summers and served as the Archbishop. It was here that he first encountered voodoo.
Given that the islands had only been in U.S. possession since the Kingdom of Denmark sold them to Washington in 1916, Whitehead, like a majority of Americans, probably knew next to nothing about the traditions of the Caribbean. He proved to be a quick learner however, and although a devout Christian, Whitehead was attentive to the stories and superstitions of the locals. He likely wrote many of these stories down, for Whitehead soon began using what he gleaned about voodoo and other Caribbean practices in his fictional sketches.
Beginning in 1924, Whitehead began publishing his horror stories in Weird Tales. These exotic yarns proved to be popular, with one devoted fan being none other than H.P. Lovecraft himself. Lovecraft and Whitehead exchanged many letters over their lifetimes, and Lovecraft called Whitehead’s 1931 story “The Passing of a God,” “perhaps the peak of his creative genius” as a specialist of weird fiction. Lovecraft’s admiration and friendship with Whitehead was so deep that the pair spent some time together at Whitehead’s home in Florida in 1931. One wonders what the two talked about, especially given Lovecraft’s ardent atheism.
In most of Whitehead’s tales, the majority of which were posthumously published after his early demise in 1932, Christianity triumphs over the evil forces of voodoo. The narrator-writer Gerald Canevin lovingly describes the dark rites imported from West Africa, and just as lovingly describes the triumph of the cross over conjure men, loas, and other sinister forces. Most of Whitehead’s stories are interconnected and draw back to a central lore involving English pirates, American gangsters, and their many misdeeds in the West Indies. Zombies are prevalent, but so too are werewolves, curses, and other horrors.
Long after his death, Whitehead’s work was collected into two books by Arkham House. Nowadays, a cheap paperback collection by Wordsworth is the go-to for anyone interested in diving into Whitehead’s world. The old churchman deserves your eyes not only because he wrote some of the earliest zombie tales in the pulps, but also because he was a damn good writer. His prose may verge on the purple, but the guts are all there. Plus, his short voodoo story “Williamson” was considered too vile to be published by at least one editor.
Speaking of vile, William Seabrook (1884-1945) ate human flesh, practiced bondage, and drank himself into a psych ward. Why did he do it? For writing, of course! Born into a preacher’s family in rural Maryland, Seabrook would later claim that he learned to love the occult and the arcane thanks to his grandmother, a healer and a witch. After attending excellent schools (including one in Switzerland), Seabrook ended his studies with a Master’s degree. He soon found himself in Atlanta. Rather than marry into Coca-Cola money, Seabrook pursued the exciting life of a journalist. This later took him to Greenwich Village where, following a stint as a medical volunteer in France during the Great War, Seabrook became something of a fixture in the bohemian scene. The problem was that nobody took him seriously as an artist. Seabrook was a yellow journalist — a writer of lurid stories fit only for perverts.
Spurred on by this rejection, Seabrook traveled to the Middle East. There he met with Bedouins, studied the then-feared Yezidi peoples of northern Iraq, and shot back drinks with French and British colonial administrators. He published his journey as Adventures in Arabia. This book became a smash hit, and before long, Seabrook was the go-to writer for any publisher looking for outré travels. The culmination of this came in 1930 with the publication of Jungle Ways. The whole point of the book was for Seabrook to make contact with cannibal tribes in French West Africa and get a taste of the forbidden delicacy. Seabrook eventually did eat human flesh, but he did so in Paris after bribing a morgue attendant to cut him off some thigh.
Between Adventures in Arabia and Jungle Ways, Seabrook published a fascinating tome called The Magical Island (1929). The book chronicles Seabrook’s travels across the island of Haiti, which was then under the administration of the U.S. Marines. Much of Seabrook’s book is excoriation of the perceived racism of the U.S. officials. Seabrook was a self-styled liberal, and his disdain for the U.S. Marines, especially its Southern officer corps, is palpable throughout the book. Despite this, The Magical Island has long been derided as a racist text because of its illustrations and cavalier attitude towards voodoo. Seabrook’s mission was to be the first white American to not only see a voodoo ceremony, but participate in one as well. The Magical Island shows him doing both, as well as seeing a real zombie for himself. One must take Seabrook’s claims with a ocean-worth of salt, and yet given the later research done by ethnologist Wade Davis, it is not entirely impossible that Seabrook saw a drugged up laborer working in the sugar cane fields on that fateful day.
The Magical Island made an immediate impression on Jazz Age America. The book directly inspired the short-lived Broadway play that would eventually become White Zombie. It was around this time that the word “zombie” entered the popular lexicon, too. If for nothing else, this is Seabrook’s chief contribution to culture. He would continue writing, but his popularity fizzled out in the 1930s. Prior to committing suicide at his mansion in Rhinebeck, New York, Seabrook spent time at a mental institution due to his alcoholism, developed a passion for witchcraft (he and his friends performed a very public “hex” on Adolf Hitler), and spent his final years producing homemade pornography.
Seabrook was in many ways the antithesis of Whitehead, and yet these two very different men helped to popularize the zombie in American culture. While today’s zombies are almost always detached from Haiti, voodoo, and other folkloric elements, the fiends of Romero’s imagination would not exist if it weren’t for Whitehead and Seabrook. Every zombie that you see owes a debt of gratitude to the Episcopal minister and the fearless journalist. Both men are worth your time, and all lovers of re-animation need to spend a night or two on the Magical Island or wandering the jungles of Saint Croix alongside a kindly minister.