The cinematic zombie descends partly from Muslim-inspired exoticism via Seabrook’s Arabian travels

Evidence

Unlike the vampire, there is no Gothic inspiration for the zombie, although Shelley’s monster features zombification in the sense that he is resurrected from the dead. However, when we look at the text that started the zombie craze, there is an interesting link. William Seabrook wrote The Magic Island in 1929, describing how “voodoo priests, commanding the knowledge of African mysticism and ritual, were able to kill their enemies and bring them back from the dead as mindless servants.” As Colin Dayan has pointed out, Magic Island exoticized the Haitians, and the book functioned “for the delectation of readers in the United States who sought justification for the occupation of Haiti.” Seabrook traveled extensively in Arabia before heading to Haiti. Furthermore, he wrote a book titled Adventures in Arabia: Among the Bedouins, Druses, Whirling Dervishes and Yezidee Devil Worshipers (1927). — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 711

Categorization

• QUESTION: How direct is the claimed lineage from Seabrook’s Arabian sojourn to zombie iconography? Something worth tracing further.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s monster taxonomy — vampire, mummy, zombie as interlocking manufactured Others — and Chapter 10’s earlier work on the vampire, if present.