Before the zombie ate anybody, it went to work. It was a Haitian creature—a body without a will, dug up and put on a sugar plantation—and the horror wasn’t that it might come for you… no, not at all. The horror was that you might actually become one. That’s the whole thing.So Pete drags the room back past Romero to the three decades when the movie zombie was still a labor instrument. White Zombie (1932) is the first one ever made. This means of course that nobody had figured out yet what a zombie was for, so it lands on a mill full of enslaved men who are not, notably, Black. They’re the boss’s rivals and creditors, converted into staff. The movie is untroubled by all of them and scandalized by one white woman’s captivity. Tommy and Kynan both want to know whether the movie has any idea what it’s doing.I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is Val Lewton handed a title he detested and answering it by adapting Jane Eyre, true story, which kinda almost works. After that, Wes Craven goes to Haiti in 1988, gets eleven of his thirty shooting days, and makes a zombie movie where nobody eats anyone and nobody is put to work. You’d think the mental model gets all broken with this one. Fear not. Running underneath: what these movies knew versus what we’re giving them credit for, why the creator is always scarier than the creature, and Pete’s standing position that being buried alive is the worst thing that can happen to a person.
Reference LinksFrom the show

• Show home: Sitting in the Dark
• Last month’s episode: The Land of the Screams and the Home of De-Praved
• Tommy’s cursed-objects episode: Articles of Loathing
• Become a member: The Next Reel family of film shows · join here

Tonight’s triple feature

• White Zombie (1932, dir. Victor Halperin) — Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd | Wikipedia (also public domain — free on Tubi, Pluto, Plex, and the Internet Archive, though print quality varies wildly)
• I Walked with a Zombie (1943, dir. Jacques Tourneur) — Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd | Wikipedia
• The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988, dir. Wes Craven) — Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd | Wikipedia

Mentioned on the episode

• Black Zombie (2026, dir. Maya Annik Bedward) — the documentary Chelsea caught at SXSW that complicated her relationship with Serpent. Letterboxd · in limited theatrical release from Kino Lorber since September 11
• Pete’s absurd comparison: Bulworth on The Next Reel
• Pete’s buried-alive anxiety, previously and at length: What’s That Smell?

The reading list

• William Seabrook, The Magic Island (1929) — the uncredited source of White Zombie, and the book that made “zombie” an American word. The Dover reissue carries an introduction by George Romero and an afterword by Wade Davis, which makes it the single most on-theme thing in this episode. Bookshop.org
• Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (1938) — Hurston went to Haiti herself, as an initiate rather than an observer. Bookshop.org
• Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) — the nonfiction book Craven adapted, and, per Chelsea, sensationalized wildly. Bookshop.org
• Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954) — Romero’s stated source for Night of the Living Dead, which is not a zombie movie and never uses the word. Bookshop.org

• (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark
• (01:38) - Zombie Movies!
• (02:36) - An Indulgence of History
• (10:14) - White Zombie
• (27:22) - I Walked with a Zombie
• (46:40) - Serpent and the Rainbow
• (01:07:16) - Coming Attractions

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