NYT: Halloween zombie costumes are cultural appropriation

It turns out that zombification is a real Haitian practice, and it's even more horrifying than in the movies.

From the New York Times:

Zombies Are Real? A Museum Tries to Bury a Hollywood Myth.

The undead monsters we know from movies and TV are distortions of a figure with roots in the religious practices of Haiti.

By Farah Nayeri

Reporting from Paris
Published Oct. 30, 2024

One of Amazon’s best-selling Halloween getups this season is a deluxe zombie costume. Designed for boys ages 3 to 16, it features a tattered shirt that reveals the zombie’s plastic bones, and a hood over a skeletal mask. An ax is included.

The costume represents the zombies we know from movies and TV: scary creatures that used to be dead people and have come back to life. Yet according to a new exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, “Zombies: Death Is Not the End?” (through Feb. 16, 2025), that representation is a distortion.

Zombies are actually a group of people in present-day Haiti who number around 50,000 and who were never dead, the exhibition explains. Many of them were, rather, subjected to a form of religious punishment known as zombification: drugged, buried alive, then exhumed in a state of stupor, and enslaved.

Swell.

Makes me want to import more Haitian culture into the U.S.