Are Zombies Real? Part 1 - With Mali Elfman - A Study of Strange

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Warning.
This episode contains detailsthat some listeners
may find disturbing.
Zombies.
The Mindless Killershave taken over TV and film.
What was once a marginal creatureplaying second or third fiddle to classic
monsters of early pulp comics and horrormovies like vampires and werewolves.

(00:24):
Zombies have since risen, no pun intended.
They are iconic.
The idea of the zombie has changedand evolved
over time, reflecting our innermost fears.
And that's the most amazing thingabout the zombie, its adaptability.
But where did the idea of the zombiebegin?

(00:44):
Generally speaking,your mind might race to images of voodoo
ceremonies in the swamps of Louisianaor the Caribbean.
And if that's the case,there's a little bit of truth in that.
But it's also an image influenced by popculture and the whitewashing of history.
Belief in zombies, though, is very real.

(01:06):
Some claim that in Haiti
there can be up to a thousand casesof zombie ification a year.
This is a study of strange.

(01:34):
All right, You ready?
All right.
Welcome to the show.
I'm Michael May. Today.
My guest is Molly Elfman. Hi, Molly.
How you doing?
Hi. I'm good. I'm very excited to be here.
You've now been on two episodesbecause you're a part of one of our scary
stories episodes over Halloween.
You're the second, second guest.
So Mr.
Matt Glass.

(01:56):
Back left.
Of course.
Competing against.
Matt. He's always doing. That, my nemesis.
But I'm really excited to have you on.
We will be talking about some historyof the zombies and then going into
some stories of actual accounts of peoplethat may be real zombies.
It's an exciting topic for me,
and I actually wanted you onfor a very specific reason with zombies.

(02:19):
One is you're a filmmaker.
For a zombie.
Yes. You're a zombie.
No, you're a filmmaker.
We've known each other a long time.
We've worked togethera lot in the horror genre.
And this this is going to tie in nicelyto your work.
You'll be able to plug some things here.
It's going to feel like I set this upstrategically and I did not.
But one of the thingsI've always appreciated about you is

(02:40):
you are you look at the horror genre as
I don't know how I want to say this.
Basically, you're smarter than me.
That's the simple way to see it.
Do you look at you look at the genrethrough this intellectual lens
and you, you you have this abilityto find deeper meaning and things.
Are you strive toyou strive to find meaning.
And strive to be intellectual and smart.

(03:01):
There you go.
That's that's the goalthat I don't know that I achieve it.
But you are you have a feature film.
Your directorial debut for a feature filmis out.
It's coming out in the UK this monthas of this recording, Next Exit.
And with that movie particularly,we've talked a little bit
about on the Pod before,so went off to talk about a lot.
But you do look at ghosts in ain a new light,
in a different light, and really explorethe meaning of what that would be.

(03:24):
And zombies to me have this abilitywhere they can do something like that.
They can mean whateveryou want them to mean as a creative.
So that's why I sort of having you on,because I was like,
I feel like Molly is goingto bring some good stuff to this topic.
So now I feel likeI put too much pressure on you.
And seriously, it's a lot to live up to.
And especially I was about to say,like I was like, I'm the ghost girl.

(03:46):
I'm not necessarily, but then I'm like,Oh no, we did make a zombie.
I did Walker and Z.
So actually I have been I have had my timeto play with zombie Rainbow zombies.
I have a photo that keeps popping upin my like, Facebook memories thing
and I just don't post on Facebook anymore,so I never share it.
But it's both of us as zombies.
When we were doing the sizzle reel forJesus Hates Zombies.

(04:06):
Yeah.
So we've even both been zombies before.
That was fun that day.
Yeah.
Do you So do you want to just briefly,because we brought it up,
just tell people a little bitabout next exit
and where they might find it, and we cando that at the end of the episode as well.
Sure,
I have it.
Next Exit, which premiered at Tribeca FilmFestival last year
and then got picked up by Magnoliaand came out in November.

(04:28):
It's available on Amazon, Apple
and any of the other placesthat you buy your stuff and then it's
bit, but you buy your stuff. I don't know.
I guess if you buy
stuff everywhere, it's still on demand,
I guess is the way of probably sayingthat it is available on DVD as well.
I don't know about Blu ray.
Everybody keeps asking methat would make sense.

(04:50):
I haven't looked into that yet.
And then it comes out
February 20th in the UK and Ireland,which I'm very excited about.
And yeah, it's the story of a worldin which we've scientifically proven
that ghost exists and you can chooseto be a part of this new program
to cross over to the other sideand to people who are having trouble with
this life, decide that they want to leaveit and go on to the next and

(05:14):
comedy ensues.
And darkness, all those things,bugs, emotions.
Now it's maze amazing.
And like I said,you found a new way to look at that topic
and turn it into a movie.
And it's very refreshingand very interesting.
It makes you question a lot of things,which is what you want.
You also produced birth, rebirth,which just premiered at Sundance,

(05:35):
and we had Laura on a few episodes ago,so we can kind of plug that at the end
because it isfresh in our listeners minds.
And if you're new to the show,
check out that episode with Laura mossjust a few again a few few episodes ago.
All right, so
zombies, zombies.
Molly Herewe go. We're getting into them now.
As soon as I find my place in my outline,

(05:58):
we will
move into zombies Before we get into zombies.
Everybody,please hit that subscribe button.
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Molly I always used to be like.
You're asking me.
Yeah. You know, you're younger than me.
You're a kid. It's. Oh, dear God.
What does I. Do?
But hit that subscribe button, Smash it.
Get it, click it.

(06:18):
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I don't know what you bop
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It's really amazing to see numbersjust go up week after week
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(06:42):
You can find that through our website,
a study of Strange E-Commwhere you can find unedited episodes
and additional contentjust for Patreon members.
All right, there we go.
Get the best out of the way.
Molly, I'm going to have you start us offto talk about zombies.
If you find it.
Can you find that email?
And I have number onewith some things for you to read.

(07:03):
Okay, you have homework.
All right, you ready?
Go for it when you're ready.
In February of 1988,a teenager named Wilfred Dawson,
who lived in a small Haitianvillage, became ill.
He looked pale and his eyes turned yellow.
No one knew why he was sickor what ailment he was suffering.

(07:23):
Thing About eight days later, Wilfredhad failed to improve and passed away.
Doctors confirmed the deathand the family buried the body
in September of 1989.
There was a local cockfight, which is abig social event for the village.
When suddenly people saw Wilfred.
He was walking around the eventand not paying attention to the fight.

(07:45):
Everyone was shocked.
The door family was notified.
They came up and they were amazed to find
that their supposedly deadson was wandering around.
Wilfred wasn't his usual self.
He couldn't speak well.
He didn't seem to respondto his surroundings.
Village determined Wilfred was a zombie,
but then the village determinedthat Wilfred was a zombie.

(08:08):
You're reading it cold. It's good. Yeah.
That was cold. Sorry.
No, that's. That's part of the fun. Yes.
So that is just a tasteof one of the tales
that we will explore and others like it,including the case of Clare Vas Narcisse,
who's kind of like the most famous, quoteunquote, real zombie.
He inspired the book The Serpent,The Rainbow and the following film

(08:29):
that came out after it as well.
Before we get into that,
I wanted to say a word about tonight'sepisode or episodes,
because I'm going to break this
into two parts, and both partsare almost like different ideas.
I had this big, broad goal.
I wanted to learn about the etymology,the history of zombie, and also
look at some so-called real zombie storiesthat I had heard vaguely about.

(08:51):
And the statement I want to make clear uptop is that this topic is complex.
Zombies are tied to cultures and religions
that have historically been misunderstood,and there's even a lot of disagreement
about the beliefs and stories within them.
And so for specificity sake,I'll primarily be talking
about the Haitian Vodou Zombie,which is different,

(09:12):
but related in some ways to theto Louisiana voodoo.
And this is the Haitian zombieis where a lot of the lore comes from.
And if you want to learnmore on the subject and kind of go deeper
into the history which includes slaveryand colonialism and American occupation
and rebellion and religious subjugationand all these things,
the best thing I can dois just I'll provide

(09:34):
links in my show notes to various booksthat go deep into this subject,
and you're welcome to read thosejust as sort of a jumping off point.
To learn more about the subject.
We will do some of that history tonight
because we get to learnwhat the zombie came from.
But then in part two,we will be going into these accounts
of real zombies and ask, Molly, arezombies actually walking around with us?

(09:55):
There's there's some people out. There.
That might.
Yeah.
I used to live in Hollywoodwhen I first moved to L.A..
There's a lot of zombies out there.
Yeah,there's definitely a lot of zombies. Yeah.
So. Well, what do you like about zombieswhen you think about
I know inthis can be sort of related to movies
and TV or just stories or ideas,but what do you like about zombies?

(10:18):
Well, I love that you brought me on.
And you gave me this big intro. Like, I'mso smart like that.
One of the ways that I'm getting all this.
But let's roll with this. Yeah, do it.
I think the funny thingabout zombies for me, which are different
Bingo's ghosts, are emotions
and spirit, spiritual cityand what happens in the afterlife.
For me, zombies arewhat happens is more about

(10:40):
the physical bodythan necessarily the mental one.
And it is more about the physical bodyremaining when the mental is gone.
And so for me, that's always
the real intriguing one,where it does lend itself
to instead of spooky, it's
more creepy, it's more offputting, it's more gross,
which can tend to be in the right setting,

(11:02):
I think, for horror films, a little bitmore fun and a little bit more playful.
And I think that's my thing about those
jumping jacks.
I think that's my thing about zombiesthat I really like.
And the one time
that I decided to tackle zombies,it was more of a social messaging
than it was necessarilyabout the the body itself.

(11:22):
So I think that'ssomething that I like and
have gotten to experience is what happens
when the mind is goneand the body remains.
Yeah, and I'll probably say this towardsthe end of these parts or talk about it
a little bit more.
But what I like about zombies,you kind of hit
it onthe head is they can be used so easily.
They can they can be almost like held uplike a mirror to ourselves

(11:44):
or to society,whatever the fears might be of the time.
And we've even seen in the last20 or so years in movies, zombies
have always been related to like pandemicsor viruses or things of that nature.
And but they didn't start off that way.
Like, that's what's so interesting
and why I wanted to do the history of it,because they were really more
originally like mindless slaves,which I'll get into kind of why that is.

(12:07):
So it's really interesting how zombiescan be used for whatever your fear is,
and I think that's even true for whythey started off as mindless slaves,
because the zombiesthat will be exploring,
they really come about in Haitiand the Caribbean.
And actually here I'll read thisaccording to a law in Haiti,
a zombie is an individual of living death
reduced to servitude by a sorcererwho has stolen his soul.

(12:31):
So, yeah,there's no virus, there's no rage virus.
There's no,you know, not walking dead or anything.
It is really somebody that is a slave.
And Haiti has a history of slavery.
And it's really like the ultimate slaverybecause zombies don't have an afterlife
in this belief.
So it's in eternal servitude.
So it is like the worst thing in the worldimaginable.

(12:55):
And why they're so scary.
When you when youwhen I read that, by the way,
the first thing that came to my mindwas medical malpractice.
And so it's like, yeah, yeah, Well, that'sI think that's a fear.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Now, the term zombie,no one really knows the origin of it.
It's definitely got an influence from

(13:17):
kind of equatorial in West Africaand Gabon,
there's a Togo languagewhere it cut into zombie or near zombie
excuse me four,which basically means corpse and Angola.
There's zombie, which is an objectthat can be inhabited by a spirit.
There's similarities to words in the Congoregion, like in a zombie.
Even in the Americas, the Arawak,which were in the Caribbean

(13:39):
to term called Jimmy,which also means Spirit.
So there's all these interestingcorrelations, and as all language,
the history of languageis it always evolves,
it has influences from other placesand people and things.
And you know, it kind of grows togetherand evolves over time.
So that's probablywhat happened with the term zombie.
And the first time it appeared in text

(14:00):
is in 1819,in a book called The History of Brazil.
And it was actually a personthat they were writing down
whose name was Zombie,but they spelled it zombie.
So it's unrelated, but it still startsto appear because no one's agreeing.
Unlike the spelling, it's being spelleda lot of different ways, too.
So that's like the first timeit appears in text
and then it appears in a few other booksthat start to bring it up

(14:23):
in terms of life around either Africaor the Caribbean.
In 1887, a writer named LoveKatie O'Hearn was Harte
was hired by Harper's Magazineto write about the West
Indies, which is for those who don't know,that's the islands in the Caribbean.
And he lived on the island of Martiniquefor about two years,
and he wrote of the zombie and he couldn'tquite figure out what it was.

(14:44):
There is just like locals
were talking about the zombieand they were scared of the zombie.
And it was very muchthis like vague spiritual old saying.
And even in the bookhe talks about asking his landlady's
daughter what a zombie was.
And he asked, Arethese are the dead folks zombies?
And she replied, No,the zombies go everywhere.
The deadfolk would remain in the graveyard.

(15:06):
It is the zombieswho make all the noises at night.
No one can understand.
So I just.
I love that little anecdote.
I think. That.
Yeah.
And then, yeah, that might have thathonestly might have been like
the first mass publicationthat talks about the lure of the zombie
that kind of got out to at leastthe Eurocentric sort of Westernized

(15:26):
to the worldoutside of the Caribbean and Louisiana.
And there is a difference
with like the Martinique Zombielike anywhere in the Caribbean.
They're all going to haveslight differences.
I just wanted to point that outbecause I was reading about Martinique
and we're going to spend time on Haititoday because, yeah,
it definitely sounds like in Martiniquethe zombie is a bit more ghostlike.
It's not so muchthe mindless creature walking around,

(15:49):
but anyway, Haiti, that is where reallythe zombie comes together.
And from 1517 to 1804,so almost 300 years,
France and Spain were enslaving thousandsof Africans, primarily from West Africa
and bringing them to the island.
What we know is Hispaniola, that's whereHaiti and Dominican Republic are today.
But at the time it was calledSaint Domingo and they were working

(16:12):
on sugar and tobacco plantationsand the island,
the population was 90% slaves,
which just always blows my mind.
It Yeah.
And what you haveand you can it's kind of easy
to kind of see this happening,but you have all these people
from different cultures and backgroundsand towns and countries from Africa

(16:34):
being forced to live together,come to a place they don't know.
So all their beliefsare blending together.
You know, it's like a stew of thesereligions and beliefs and cultures.
And that starts blending togetherwith Catholicism on the island.
And from thisyou get this new kind of belief system
that they refer to as Vodou And Vodou.
I'm going to I'm boiling this downto a very simple thing.

(16:56):
Again, this is complex.
This is like trying to boil Christianityor any major religion down to load.
One thing, you can't do it.
They're all different. People disagree.
But let's do it right now.
Let's do it today. Here we go.
Anyway, so in Vodou,they believe that the soul is made up
of two spiritual elementsand those can be stolen.

(17:17):
Like somebody can sort oftake those for good or for bad.
And this is how somebody creates a zombie,because after death,
they believe that kind of these partsof the soul can wander for a short
period of time in Haiti, it's generallysaid to be wander for seven days.
Some people say three days.
I think in Louisiana, with voodoo,they say three days.
And the person who can make a zombieis someone called a bokor

(17:42):
and they come in after somebody has diedand they can take over the body. And.
Yeah, and I do want to say this as well.
Again, complex.
There are some
in voodoo and voter religions they calla bokor is sort of a derogatory term.
But from Haiti, people actuallylike admit their boat cause even though
they're technically like malicious,like they're kind of bad

(18:03):
priests is like a really stupid wayto describe them.
They tend to have malicious intentwith turning somebody into a zombie.
Now, the zombie, as you can kind of tell,my first thought when you hear this, is
they're a victim,like they're not the monster
from Hollywood movies nowwhere you got to be scared of zombie like
that is the victim someone has takencontrol over the body started the biting.

(18:26):
Where did the fighting come?
Sorry Movies,movies, movies did that. Yeah.
I think it's probablybecause I actually the original intention
for this episode was to do likethe history of the zombie through movies.
But so many people have done itthat I was like, No,
I'm going to go even further back in time.
But it's Romero.
Like Romero had the zombie sortof biting people and and all of that.

(18:48):
And I know there's a lot of movie nerdsthat know
more specifically to mehow it how it evolved.
But yeah, no, no braineating right away and.
No, I was going to say yeah, all that.
Laura come frombecause it seems like it's just
it does seem like all thesezombies are just victims and they're kind
of just wandering aroundafter people have used them up.
That's so sad.
But they got turned into these villains.Absolutely.

(19:09):
Yeah. They they're a victim in this.
That is it is a very sad thing.
And there's a writer in 1913,a guy named Steven
Bonzo wrote this bookcalled The American Mediterranean.
And he it's really funnybecause you can find it online.
And I pulled up a bunch of it.I didn't read the whole thing.
It's kind of like breezed through it.
He's very racist.

(19:31):
It and everything.
He was writing about Haiti, he'sa very, very racist.
But he was one of the first to implythat the Bowker these guys making zombies
were using a mix of like a drug,like a poison to create the zombies.
So he's like the first onethat I can find.
Anyway, he was putting almost likea logistical method to how they do this.

(19:53):
And so he's suggesting that there's apoison that makes the appearance of death,
and then there's an antidotethat can bring somebody out of it
and they're supplied with something elseto sort of take control over their mind.
There is a way that.
Yeah, there you go.That's what I was thinking of, too.
Yeah. You got to appear like you're dead.
And then when they come out,they a lot of times we'll get into this

(20:14):
a little bit more.
But there could be a hallucinogeniccompound that's given to them after
they're they're,
quote unquote, dead, because that'show you can basically control the person.
You make them grow.
They're all hallucinate,eating and feeling crazy.
There is even a local sort of fruitcalled the zombie cucumber,
because this is a thingthat grows on a tree

(20:34):
that actually has thesehallucinogenic compounds
that might be used insome of the Bocas concoctions.
And you don't really hear thiscome up again through the history
of peoplewriting about Haiti and zombies and stuff.
Until the 1980s, when Wade Daviswrote Serpent in the Rainbow, he's
the one that actually was like tryingto figure out what is in these concoctions

(20:54):
that brokers are usingto turn people into zombies
and actually studied themfrom a scientific element.
And we're going to come back to that later
because that relates to one of our realzombie stories.
Molly is going to reada section of Basil's book here.
Okay.
Let's see.
There are many who believe thateven at this late day,

(21:15):
if the medicine man who first administeredthe poison to
this unfortunatecould also be found in the can't wait.
I think there's a bit of it'sa bit of a run on sentence.
So that's not my fault. That is his fault.
I'm trying to.
Okay.
There are many who believe thateven at this late day, if the medicine man

(21:37):
who first administered the poison tothis unfortunate could be found
an antidote that might be forthcoming,that there would that they will restore
the victim of these barbarous practicesto help and to reason.
In fact, if a serious prosecutionof these malefactors
who work in the guiseof religious servants

(21:58):
is ever undertaken,the most serious obstacle is to success
will be the unfortunate victims themselvesand their families who dread the power
which has been demonstrated uponthose who are near
and dear to them.
Yeah, yeah.
Good job, because that.
Is that is a hard sentence.

(22:18):
Yeah.
I don'the doesn't quite use commas correctly like
he uses a lot of commas and then he usesno commas for like a long time.
It's really frustrating and strange.
Now the law of the Vodou zombie,
it starts to become more specificto outsiders.
People outside of Haiti, in the Caribbeanin the early 20th century
because of books like this,but because of this like racist

(22:42):
view of Haiti, it's scary.
It's almost scarier than it should be.
Like the idea of voodoo in voodoojust is scarier because it's so secretive.
And the reasonthis religion in these practices became so
secretive is really tiedinto the history of Haiti,
which I'll do like a brief saying,and I don't know why Hollywood has never

(23:04):
made a movie about the Haitian rebellionbecause it's just unbelievable.
So Haiti, like we said earlier,it was 300 years of slavery.
And during that time, as you can imagine,the slave owners outlawed Vodou.
They saw these weird ceremonies and dances
and they're like,Oh, that must be the devil.
Even though they're French, I'mgoing British because that's what I do.
And they're just
they're like,
Oh, they must be worshiping the deviland sacrificing babies and whatever.

(23:27):
So they just kind of like,You guys can't do this anymore.
So Vodou becomes this backwoodsup in the mountains, secretive practice.
And then Haiti has a revolution.
They they win their independence.
They're the first kind of former slave
slave rebellionthat wins their independence.
And they win that independence in 1804.
And which is amazing because they go upagainst the most powerful military

(23:50):
in the world at the time.
The French to win their independence. Now,
that isa tangent, but Haiti, one of the reasons
they're so poor to this day
is they basically promised France thatgive them everything of value forever.
So they're just like completelynever really had a chance.
But yeah, they won independenceand that's amazing.
That's so. Sad.
And then thethe leaders of Haiti, though, they are

(24:12):
they're trying to appealto the outside world.
They kind of see the religion of voodooas this peasant religion.
So even though they were formerlyslaves and stuff,
they kind of still see it nowas this peasant religion.
So they continue to outlaw it.
So again, it kind of keeps itin the backwoods, secretive kind of thing.
And as any topic I cover on this podcast,anything mysterious just drives

(24:38):
more speculation, which makes it even moremysterious and more scary.
Yeah, Yeah.
So it's it's really interesting.
So even today, votersmore accepted and welcomed.
And some estimates say that50% of Haitians are believers in Vodou,
but it still has thislike secretive feeling.
And I've watched a bunch of documentariesnow on the subject,
and it still has this like,Oh, you have to talk to this person

(24:58):
to get you, this personto get to this person.
And then they have to talk to youbefore they're really,
really willing to share what they do.
And yeah, so it's definitely got thismysterious aura about it.
It also makes sense with any
any group of peoplethat is being suppressed that they're
trying to find waysin which that is happening and occurring
and in which ways you can find poweror hurting other people.

(25:21):
Yeah, it's also like allall of these different things
kind of folding againinto the social issues that are going on.
Yes. At the time.
And but it is so crazy to think that.
But what this again, time is backto medical practice and tying this back
to people that are doing this in orderin order to make others subservient

(25:44):
is pretty terrifying because it is
you could understand where the fearwould come from because it feels as if
you could be taken overbecause somebody chooses to.
I completely agree with you,but you just made me
think of one of the things I read thatis not in my outline where some people saw
the idea of like zombie ificationwith there's two sides of the coin.

(26:06):
So there's the side of like
eternal slavery and fear ofbeing taken over and controlled.
And the other side of that is you could
turn somebody that's in charge of youinto a zombie as well.
There is that possibility.
So there's kind of like it's like a dualyeah, there's a dual side to it as well,
which I just.
Found to be able to hurtthose people that have hurt you or you.

(26:29):
Yeah.
I mean that makes sense.
That's, I mean that's an issuethat we can talk about for a while.
So we should that the desire ofthat is very clear, especially with all,
especially when you just said
that they made a deal with Francein which they perpetually have to
give them all these things,which is the problem.
And it's like, Oh, that's so disruptive,so dramatic.

(26:51):
It is. It is.
And it's sadly, there's there'smore to come in that in that world.
No, it doesn't get happier.
No, no, no. Oh.
No, no, no.
This sort of the secrecy around Vodouand the idea of zombies
and things like that, it starts to changebecause between 1915 and 19,
it's like 1934, I think the U.S.

(27:13):
actually actually occupies Haiti.
And so this kind of perpetuatesthis idea that Haiti's.
Yeah, Haiti is now in debt to the U.S.
They were in debt to Francefor like a hundred.
Now they're in debt to the U.S.
And the U.S., of course,
takes this very, like, racist attitudetowards the local customs and practices.
So it keeps it being weird.
But however, there are Americans there

(27:34):
who are now writing about itand they're writing about the rumors
they might takethat American point of view of it,
which affects things, butthey're still at least like the stories
are starting to become morejust aware to, again,
kind of the Western quoteunquote Eurocentric kind of Western world.
And this includesa guy named William SEABROOK.
He wrote a book called The Magic Island.

(27:54):
He actually wrote a few other booksabout stuff around there, too.
But the Magic Islandis kind of his big one.
And he wrote of actually seeing peoplethat looked like
dead men working in the fieldswho were expressionless
and had strange eyesthat had no life behind them.
And he he calls it voodoo.
So it was voodoo locally.
But of course, he's American.
He's just going to call it voodooand it becomes American ized.

(28:17):
And it talks about weird ceremoniesand black magic and starts
to describe zombies.
And hereI'm actually going to read this one. Mali.
This is not one I shared with you,
but this is a segment of WilliamSeabrook's broke book.
He writes, The zombie,they say, is a soulless human corpse,
still dead,
but taken from the grave

(28:37):
and endowed by sorcerywith a mechanical semblance of life.
It is a dead body which is made to walkand act and move as if it were alive.
People who have the power to do thisgo to a fresh grave,
dig up the body beforeit has had time to rot,
galvanize it into movement,and then make it
a servant or slave occasionallyfor the commission of some crime,

(29:00):
more often simply as a drudgearound the habit ization or the farm
setting it dole heavy tasksand beating it like a dumb beast.
If it's slack, it's
Oh, that was actually hard to read too.
So what does this mean? Sorry,
my head is in zombies.

(29:20):
I haveto be buried in order to come back out.
But in order to be a zombiewithin this type of law,
does that mean that there's probably,like a lot of zombies
that are buried that just didn'tget back up out of the surface?
You know, actually, I was going to talkabout that in part two and I'm sorry.
No, no, no, no.
It's a fantastic that's that's whatthat's what the show is about.
It's about me getting my likebasically losing my place in my outline.

(29:43):
No, it's a perfect time to bring it upbecause I actually people in Haiti
believe that to this day, like
that is the important thing to remember is
there are people that believe in zombies.
And some accounts saythat there's like sals, like a thousand
reports of zombies a year in Haiti.
We don't have a lot of data on that.
There's I'm going to share the quoteunquote, real stories

(30:03):
I've been able to find.
But you can't find a lot of details about.
A lot of these storiesare more like anecdotal.
But if if this powder if this concoctionthat bankers use to try to create
a zombie is real, it is very dangerous
and not just in terms of tryingto have an effect on someone's mind,
but if it is realand if it works, my theory is that it

(30:27):
kills people a lot when you try itlike there's going to be brain
damage if they do survive.
Yeah, it'sjust I think it's a very dangerous thing.
So I think if you look at like sedativestoo, and things like that,
because there's definitelyI don't do very well with
like what was the last thing that I hadthat I had to take after a surgery.

(30:48):
I don't have it or some type of it,but like, I definitely don't
think my mind was there for a whileand I was like,
I mean, it does seem likeit would be very possible,
but if you could control that where it'snot coming back on or where you whenever
part of the mind that has access with thatdrug doesn't come back online, it's
not that hard to think of how you couldliterally with chemicals create that.

(31:11):
Yeah you know, it is a soul in the mindor in the body or where is the soul?
I mean, a whole bunch of questions here.
A bunch of questions. Bunch of questions.
And we will hopefully will be able to diveinto that a little bit more as we tell
some of these real stories of peoplethat might have been turned into zombies.
It's getting more creepy.
It's getting creepier as we go. It is.

(31:31):
It is creepy.
It is creepy.And that's part of the horror.
Yeah, it's okay. It's it's okay.
Well, I'll tell you what.
I'll tell you about the first zombie movie
because we see Brooksbook in the thirties.
Like these storiesare coming out of Haiti now.
So of course, that influences Hollywood.
So the first zombie movie is calledWhite Zombie.
It was produced in 1932.
It had Bela Lugosi playskind of like the evil Sorcerer guy.

(31:56):
But of course it is Hollywood in the 1930.
So the victim is a white woman.
He lusted after a white womanand sort of made her a mindless zombie.
And that is the first zombie movieever made.
Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, it's so problematic.
Oh, no.
Oh, God, yes. Yes.
No. So anyway, that is again,a very kind of brief overview

(32:17):
of the history of kind of zombiesbeing established
in Haitian religion and beliefsand law and local customs.
Again,I'm not focusing on Louisiana voodoo.
Voodoo. I did not go into that.
They do share a similar backgroundbecause you had slavery
and immigrants from West Africabringing their beliefs combining together,
and you also had Haitian immigrants

(32:38):
coming from Haitiduring the rebellion into Louisiana.
So you do there's there's a combinationof things, but it is different.
And I did notI spent so much time researching this
and didn'thave time to look at voodoo, too.
So another another day. Another day.
But yes.
So the zombie starts to come to public'sattention
because of movies,because of books in this time period.

(33:00):
And then our first kind oflike our first real zombie
story comes out, at least to the public'sattention in America, from the author
Zora Neale Hurston, who is a legendof the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.
She was an anthropologist.
I think she even made some filmsand stuff, too.
And she wrote about the strugglesin the South.

(33:20):
She had also writtenabout Voodoo in the 1920s, and so in 1936
she applied and got a Guggenheimgrant to go to Haiti to study
Vodou and study the local local customs.
And she was the perfect person to do itbecause she had already
been writing about this stuff againin Louisiana, in the south.
And so in Haiti,she published or after her

(33:44):
travels to Haiti, she published the bookTell My Horse in 1938,
and she has a whole chapter about zombies.
And I will link the book.
You can find this book for free online.
Now, she had heard of a varietyof cases of real zombies,
including a story of a Protestantmissionary minister who told her of a man
who fell dead on a dance floor

(34:04):
that said and he sawthe man placed in his tomb buried.
And then a few weeks later,
this man was found alive again,but in prison, locked up.
I could not find more details on this guy,but that's one of the stories
she hears.
She's also told of the case of Marie M,which apparently is a very famous story
in the early 1900s in Haiti in 1909,a young girl died.

(34:27):
And five years later,I think she was a teenager.
Five years later, friends of herswere walking down the street
and they saw Marie in a houselike through a window.
And so people came tothe house are knocking the door.
They're like our friends here.What's going on?
And the person who lived there wouldn'tlet them in.
Marie's father got a warrant and the housewas searched because it was found empty.
They dug up Marie's coffinand they found a skeleton

(34:50):
that was too long for the coffin,so it might not have been her
and sort of the local legend goesthat this man, they.
Found somebody elseand put her in that coffin.
Really? Somebody else?
Yeah.
So I say, okay, this is.
This is a local legend, too.
There's no like, there's no actualevidence to this tale that she's hearing.
Now, the story goes that the man who ownedthat house died

(35:13):
and brokers,brokers are in control of the zombies.
If a broker dies,the zombie is now set free.
So the man dies. And apparently his wife
didn'tlike having all these zombies around.
So she set them free.
And apparently Marie had been sentto France, where she lived in a convent.
Again, local legend.

(35:34):
No, no basis to fact in any of this.
But that is.
A so stories. Of dying.
She died in 1909.
It's five years laterthat she her friends see her.
But this story is being told.
It's like 30 years after that. So.
Okay, it's been some time.
It's age.
Do we know if she aged?
I don't. I that is all.

(35:55):
All I readis what I've kind of shared there. Yeah.
I don't have a lot of questions.I'm going to need to do an interview.
We're going to needto bring somebody else on here.
Absolutely. I don't.
I would love to.
In fact, that being said, please,if anybody out there,
if you are a practitioner of voodooor voodoo or you know somebody that is or
somebody that studied the history of Haitior anything like this, let me know.

(36:15):
M Email mea study of strange at gmail.com.
I would love to do an interviewor something.
We can both do it.
MollyYou can come to Will have a long chat.
And then nowthose two little anecdotal stories,
I think I'm goingto, I'm just assuming sort of inspired
Zora to, to explore this topic further.

(36:36):
And she got intrigued and I'm going to
have you read the next thing,Molly I think number three.
So this is from her book.
All right.
What is the truth about Nothing else.
I can't read
the truth about nothing elseabout zombies.

(36:57):
Some funny. Okay.
What is the truth about nothing elseabout zombies?
I do not understand the sentence.
My answer to about.
I don't know, thinking about. DidI? Maybe I.
Maybe I messed up typing it.
I might have messed up. You know what?
Why don't you just skipthat first and just.
Start on the next one?
What is the truth about zombies?

(37:19):
I had the good fortune to learn of severalcelebrated cases in the past.
And then in addition,
I had the rare opportunityto see and touch an authentic case.
I listened to the broken
noises in its throat, and then I did whatno one else had ever done.
I photographed it.
Dun, dun dun dun.

(37:39):
So this is where we're going to.
In partone, we've done our kind of nerdy history
chat and we're going to be gettinginto our real zombie stories,
including the first onewe're going to start with
is what itwhat Zora Neale Hurston is talking about.
And yeah, this is this includes again,the story of Player V Narcisse.
There's also a supposed zombie casewith someone named Felicia mentor

(38:02):
and two other real zombie storiesthat we're going to talk about
in our next episode,which I am super excited about.
They're so interesting.
So Molly
and I get to see the photographs.
Oh, yeah, I can.I can share that with you.
Let's first, though, I'll share with youat the beginning of part two.
Okay.But is there anything you want to plug?

(38:24):
Can you tell people where to findyour movies, including Birth Rebirth?
Because we didn't get to really talkabout that much or you on social,
whatever you want to share.
Oh, yeah. Well,you can't find birth rebirth yet.
We just premiered at Sundancea couple of weeks ago.
There was a blast.
I've never played Sundance before,so my first time as
many times tryingfirst time, actually going there

(38:45):
with the film, it was a blast.
We'll have more information.
It'll be coming out through Shudder laterthis year
and next.
Sense8 on demand and on DVD
and available in the UKstarting February 20th.
Oh, and also I should say this,
the other one that actually both youand I worked on your book.

(39:06):
Yeah, that's right. I'm just an alternate.
You can find it on YouTubevery easily as well.
Yeah, that's with KarenGillan and John Bass, written
by Nick Kocher with Laramie once againdirecting.
Yeah, and my friend Dustinjust interviewed Laura and Nick.
So yeah, that was fun. It was fun.
I know.
I saw that interview put you, but

(39:28):
I haven't seen it.
You should read it. It's very fun.
Yeah, very cool.
But thank you again, Molly, for coming on
and I will talk to youvery shortly for part two.
Can't wait.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you to Molly Elfman for being here.
And tune in next week when we concludethis two parter about our zombies real,

(39:50):
where we're actually going to gointo the detailed accounts of real zombies
and also ask what zombies might mean,why people believe in them,
and how they've been utilizedand used effectively by media.
Make sure you are following us onInstagram at a study of strange as usual.
Send me thoughts, notes, ideas, comments.

(40:12):
You can email me a study of strangeall one word at gmail.com.
Check us out on Patreonwhere you can listen to these episodes
free of commercials and uneditedso you get to hear me
make mistakes constantly,which is pretty fun.
So you can check that outthrough our website.
WW iwd a study of strange dcoms

(40:32):
in the next couple of weeksbesides concluding zombies,
we have another episode
I'm really excited about,about the Connecticut Witch trials
and then I'm going to do something maybe,I don't know, maybe let me know.
Listeners send me a messageif this is a good idea or not,
I may do a Bigfoot episodeand my guest would be my six year

(40:53):
old son who is obsessed with Bigfoot.
It would be a
different sort of episodebecause it would be very kid friendly.
Send me a message.
Let me knowif you think that would be a good idea.
It honestly kind of comes down to him.
Will he sit here and talk to mefor a little bit of time?
I think that's the big questionin the matter.

(41:14):
But yeah, so anyway, stay tuned forthose things and thank you for listening.
Goodnight.

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Are Zombies Real? Part 1 - With Mali Elfman

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Are Zombies Real? Part 1 - With Mali Elfman