The zombi: from the enslaved worker's nightmare to Hollywood's flesh-eater

SUMMARYThe zombi: from the enslaved worker's nightmare to Hollywood's flesh-eater (Nov 5, 2026). Tito: "What about zombies?"
RECORD, Haitian law: Article 246 of the Haitian Penal Code (from the 1835 code; often quoted from the 1864 text) treats using substances that cause a prolonged death-like lethargy as attempted murder, and as murder if the person was then buried (verify the exact wording against a printed code).
RECORD, the cases: Zora Neale Hurston photographed a woman identified as Felicia Felix-Mentor, said to be a zombie, at a hospital in Ayiti in 1936 (Tell My Horse, 1938). Clairvius Narcisse was declared dead in 1962 and reappeared in 1980; Wade Davis (The Serpent and the Rainbow, 1985) proposed a tetrodotoxin powder

DISPUTEDtoxicologists challenged the samples and doses.
WITNESS CHECK, Hurston (Tito: "Zora Neale Hurston, surprisingly hostile because of her connections to the Africa-first stuff"):

RECORDHurston trained in anthropology under Franz Boas (Barnard/Columbia), whose school framed Black culture in the Americas as "African survivals" (later Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, 1941). Her folklore collecting (1927–32) was financed under contract by the wealthy white patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, who controlled the use of the material; her Ayiti and Jamaica fieldwork was funded by Guggenheim fellowships (1936, 1937). Tell My Horse includes passages viewing the US occupation favorably (verify the passage and page). Her Felix-Mentor photo was taken in a hospital, without the woman's consent. LABEL: interested witness: a Black insider in person, working inside a funded, Africa-first academic frame. Read her for what she saw; weigh her framing.
RECORD, the word: "zombi" is often traced to Kongo-language words such as nzambi ("god, spirit") or zumbi ("ghost, spirit of the dead"); the exact origin is Disputed.
RECORD, the turn to Hollywood: William Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929), written during the US occupation, set its zombies working the cane fields of the Haitian-American Sugar Company (HASCO); the film White Zombie (1932) followed; Night of the Living Dead (1968) made them flesh-eating monsters

PATTERNin Ayiti the zombi is a person robbed of will and made to work without end, the fear of slavery itself; the US occupation-era books placed that figure in a US-owned sugar company's fields, and Hollywood turned it into a monster to fear

LENS (WW9)the zombi was the enslaved worker's nightmare; they rebranded it as our monster

OPENthe exact text of Article 246 by edition; first-person Haitian accounts of zombification before 1900 (the Ayiti spirit round). Needs deep research.