Director: Menotti Bucco

Editor: Marco Ruocco

Format: Digital Video PAL and Betacam SP PAL

Length: 52 minutes

SYNOPSYS

Everybody heard about Zombies, but few know that they come from Haiti and even fewer know that they are not a legend made up by horror movies makers, but they actually exist.

There is nothing supernatural in all that of course, but just a very skilled capability of manipulating animal and vegetal extracts by Haiti’s bokors, the black magic witch men.

Over past centuries they learned to manipulate a special powder (zombification powder) that mixed with itchy substances it is blown on the skin of the unlucky fellow that by way of scratching lets it into his system through skin micro wounds.

One of the basic ingredients of this powder is a neurotoxin extracted by the puffer fish, the tetrodotoxin, that used in small doses acts as an aphrodisiac. It constitutes the basis for a number of Asian dishes like Japanese fugu-fugu, but if it is not skillfully dosed it may induce a serious impoisonment that could lead up to the subject’s death.

Haitian bokors learned to dose it and to mix it with other secret animal and vegetal ingredients and they obtained a substance capable of inducing a sate of apparent death which they can interrupt with an antidote after 24 to 48 hours. In most cases the effects of a lengthy poor oxygenation of the brain cause permanent damage to the brain itself and give the “zombies” “the out of this world “ look that let Haitians believe that they actually came back from the realm of darkness.

The Psychiatry Department of Port-au-Prince General Hospital over the years has seen many of these cases for whom unfortunately they were not able to do much. In the early nineties while shooting a photo story I have had the chance of meeting one of these patients, a young woman, who had in her file her death certificate dating three days back.

The practice of zombification is one of the many of the island religion. Voodoo laws require that a member of the community that perpetrated a serious damage to another one has to be sentenced to a capital punishment while put in the condition of paying off his debt. The subject is then zombiefied and two days after his burial he is “resurrected” by the bokor to be given to the damaged person so he can work in the fields as a slave for life to pay off his debt.

Very often the zombification was perpetrated by the bokors upon payment of a fee as a murder on demand.