How to Make a Zombie

No, seriously, this thread is about how to make a zombie. In this particular case, the Haitian zombies famed throughout the Carribean. I've been on a bit of a zombie kick lately, thanks to the works of Max Brooks, but in reading some unrelated material, I found an article about how Haitian zombies are created, and did more looking into it as well. No one appears to have done a serious thread on zombies yet, so I figure, what the heck.

Before I begin, a couple of misconceptions to clear up:

First, Haitian zombism is not a communicable disease, it is an artificial state of psychosis caused by drugs. If one bites you, it will almost certainly be septic (the human mouth is filthy), but you can rest assured that it will not cause you to turn into a zombie.

Second, they are not reanimated dead. They are, however, very very close to death during the creation process. They are not the spawn of satan, nor are they aliens. They can move, eat, hear, speak, but have no memory and no insight into their condition.

Third, they cannot be mass produced. This is a very careful, expensive, and dangerous process requiring very skilled preparation, application, and follow-through, to avoid killing the victim. Most die in the process.

Let's create a typical Haitian Zombie scenario on a micro-scale with only three people:

Bob, our hapless victim.
Jimbo, a plantation owner.
Marie, a skilled medicinal herbalist.

1.) Jimbo has a plantation run mainly off servant labor (not entirelly unheard of in third world countries), and he spots Bob, a poor young man with a strong back, without family nearby.

2.) Jimbo then hires Marie, who slips a rather nasty concoction of cane toad (bufo marinus) skin and puffer fish in Bob's drink one day which lowers his heart, breathing, and so forth, to an almost imperceptable level. The active ingredients of the poison are Tetrodotoxin, biogenic amines, bufogenine, and bufotoxins. These are all extremely dangerous toxins, and should NEVER be slipped to someone as a "joke". In all probability, it will, more often than not (roughly 60% of the time), kill the victim, and even if it doesn't they will end up brain damaged as a result.

3.) Because most places in Haiti lack refrigeration, the dead are buried very quickly, often without any of the prep work one might find in a funeral home. Since skilled doctors are at a premium, every so often someone who isn't really dead will be mistakenly buried, intact. Bob, who is now in a coma-like state, gets buried.

4.) With the decreased heart and breath rate, the average coffin space has about eight hours worth of air, which is both good news and bad news for Bob. As a result, if he is to be "resurrected", he must be dug up within eight hours. As it gets closer to the eight-hour mark, Bob will suffer more and more brain damage from very slow oxygen starvation.

5.) Once the "corpse" has been dug up, and revived, he is then force-fed a paste of datura stramonium (jimsonweed). The chemical in jimsonweed has the capacity to break one's links with reality in the present, and disassociate the links to recent memory.

6.) As a result, the person is now left in a state of psychotic amnesia. They do not know what day it is, where they are, or even who they are. And because of the disassociative identity disorder created by the jimsonweed, they are unable to learn any of these as well. Most at this point are so far gone they can't even speak.

7.) Bob is now a zombie, trapped in a semi-permanent state of psychotic delirium, and sold to Jimbo, the evil Plantation owner, as slave labor. Because Bob has already been declared legally dead, and is presumably buried, the chance of anyone who would know him discovering his fate is very slim. Bob certainly won't object, and if he starts coming to his sense, he is simply given more datura.

Just such a case was discovered in 1980, when zombie Clairvius Narcisse was investigated by Harvard enthnobiologist Dr. Wade Davis, which, incidentally, is how the process was discovered. In 1962, Clairvius refused to sell his share of the family land. Soon after he officially "died" and was buried, then dug up and sold to a plantation owner as slave labor. In 1964, when the plantation owner died, Clairvius wandered around Haiti for 16 years until, in 1980, he quite literally stubled into his sister in a marketplace, and recognized her. She didn't recognize him at first (remember, by now 18 years had passed), but he identified himself to her by telling her early childhood experiences that only he could possibly know. This remarkable tale is what prompted Dr. Davis to investigate the process in the first place, who later published his findings in the non-fiction book "The Serpent and the Rainbow" (also a movie by Wes Craven).



[edit on 11/14/2006 by thelibra]

to create modern day zombies , it is far easier

just take otherwise normal human children .

send them to public school
feed them snak foods , burgers and soda 24/7
encourage them to sit infromt of the tee vee watching 500 chanels of drivel .
avoid any meaningfull mental or physical exercise

hey presto - a zombie army awaits , though exactly what they are any use for is beyond me .

its zombies jim ..... but not as we know it

appologies - i could not resist - the subliminal ads made me do it

exelent...:)) i had loved that one!hihi.
good black humor, but also so true^^.

You know, I got to thinking about it last night, and you could actually mass produce these zombies provided a uniform dilution of both steps were used with a syringe rather than just random application. That way you could administer the right amount based on body weight.

But then, I cannot help but wonder whether or not a Haitian Zombie would make a good shock trooper or not. Anyone know how these guys perform in combat? Is it better or worse than robots?

ignorant_ape, TV children make terrible shock troopers. If you're trying to amass an army for world domination, then it'd be better to use them in a more support/logistics role, like the potato farms.

So thats how Dick Chaney did it huh?

I think that this article is pretty cool!
I loved it!
Sweet!

Yepp... I've heard of this. We actually talked about it in my physiology and disease class. The stuff lowers your heart rate and breathing rate so much, often most doctors would miss that your alive unless they were actually looking for this. Then later the poisoner would give some antidote to the poisonee, and voila!, instant zombie. I was told that with so much brain damage, one can't think but if you told them to say, go mow the lawn, they would know what to do and how to do it and would listen but couldn't process anything. There is some pretty weird stuff in this world...

Imagine all those forgotten methods and rituals, and others we simply don't know about yet.

Hard Drug's turn alot of people into Zombies, I believe Christopher Hyatt call's them Coke Zombie's, everyone seems to act like Special H Case's and do what they are told to do, I hate it and abhor it.

School = Mind Control, as does Television and the Media War Machine, in fact even Conversation's can con us to element's of Mind Control.

Whether the Army can make good Zombie's is another matter.

There's actually a really great movie that deals with Hatian Zombies... It's called Serpent in the Rainbox. It actually goes into how the person really isn't dead but induced into a catatonic state by this powder that is suposedly blown into the person's face. It goes into how the heartbeat is so slow and faint that it can't be detected and the person suffers from paralysis, but it concious of everything.

Pretty interesting little movie, if you haven't seen it, I reccommend it for the Zombie lovers out there

Originally posted by Trinity_IX
There's actually a really great movie that deals with Hatian Zombies... It's called Serpent in the Rainbox.

Yep that's actually based off Dr. Wade Davis's work on the subject.
Here's a link to the movie's page on wiki...

en.wikipedia.org...

One of these days I'm gonna get around to renting it.

good point ignorant_ape but i think george a. romero and his fellow cynic jello biafra made the same point many atime

I have degrees in anthropology, and can tell you that Davis' work rocked the ethnographic world at the time. Zombies had always been treated as a myth. Too bad their wasn't an ATS back then---someone would have gotten a lot of points!!!!

Reading your excellent overview as the OP, I was struck afresh by the horror of this technique; and it set me thinking.

I do volunteer work with the homeless, and have seen this exact state, caused by "tweaking meth." The user takes a big initial dose, and then continues maintainence doses to keep the high until all their financial resources and social connections are gone. Sometimes for weeks, and then wakes up one day with no recollection of the intervening events.

I have, in the last week, gotten to know 3 such meth-heads. One told me of waking up in a jail. His last memory was almost a month earlier, when he was a college student almost 400 miles away, at a prestigious university. Some of his friends got their student loan checks on the same day as he did. His last memory is of them joking about going to the bad neighborhood, and trying some meth.

Another guy had a great job as a skilled worker on a massive construction site. His last memory was from six weeks before, when he and friends were going to a bar after being paid. He was found at the homeless shelter by his previous employer, who owed him thousands of dollars in paychecks he never collected when he just disappeared. He maintains that not all of his money was spent by him--that someone got his account info from him while he was listed as being jailed, and cleand out all his bank accounts while he was a prisoner, and had no access to ATM's. the police and banks ignore it as the ravings of a dope fiend. His car also disappeared, as did all the furnishings in his house. The obvious conclusion is that he sold them for drugs without remembering; but he swears he was too high to have carried load after load of furnishings anywhere, and there's no record at any pawnshops or anything.

I think "meth zombie" might be an apt metaphor, and might contain more truth that it would first appear.

.

Originally posted by dr_strangecraft
I think "meth zombie" might be an apt metaphor, and might contain more truth that it would first appear.

That's an interesting point. the frightening (and yet fascinating) thing about some drugs is their ability to freeze, or at least, slow down, the ability of the brain to create new memories while in the system. Hence why the meth-heads you studied couldn't remember what transpired over their maintenance binges, why bufos can bring about zombism, and so forth. It can even be seen on a much smaller, less harmful scale with weed, in the ever-so-common "uhh...what were we talking about?" scenario.

Also, since you mentioned you're an anthropology graduate, you might be interested in
this thread. In a nutshell, it's a very scientific thread regarding how the various parts of the brain calculate morality.

In congnitive psychology, Charles T. Tart popularized the concept of "state specific learning" with regard to altered states of consciousness.

This is expressed in a very mundane way when you take a final exam in college. Both individually and as a goup, students perform best on tests when the test is given at the same time of day, and in the same room, as the information was presented. Students who sit near the same spot where they learned test better than those sitting in a new part of the class.

On a more profound level, state specific learning has grave implications for altered states of consciousness and their investigation. Dream recall frequently only occurs within another dream. Most westerners have had the experience of being in a dream and remembering, "oh yeah, I've had this dream before---I dream this one all the time; why can't I ever remember it when I wake up???"

Some near-death experiencers have reported the same feeling of deja vu, once they left their bodies, and a symmetrical perception of a loss of information and knowledge upon the return of their person to the physical body.

In that sense, bufodrugs (and indeed, the whole indole group) seem to affect the way our brain stores memories.

One of the impediments to creating a "truth serum" is that the dosage must be so extreme as to essentially "zombify" the test subject; this is self-defeating for obtaining detailed information.

Another problem with sodium pentathol and other "truth serums" is that they only work on people who have little knowledge of other states of consciousness. They were found to be useless on alcoholics, recreational drug users, and people who were attempting various meditation disciplines. I've heard rumors that the training for agents who were at risk for being captured included using psychedelics, to immunize them for truth drugs.

With respect to the creation of zombies, I wonder whether "zombie drugs" would be less effective when used on people who, in the words of Jimi Hendrix, "have ever been experienced."

.

When I think mass-produced zombie, I think 28 Days Later. A virus, blood borne, which finds it's way to the brain, and sets noradrenaline, adrenaline, hormones, and catecholamines through the roof. Voila. Someone strong, insane, incapable of thought or control as well as being infectious.

DE

See, see, that's the thing right there - strong and insane, and don't forget fast. Shuffling, fumbling zombies are one thing. The movie version of the undead that sort of ramble around and bump into stuff. Zombies that run after you? That's an entirely new sort of horror right there.

That's one thing that's bad for you...

ignorant_ape, TV children make terrible shock troopers. If you're trying to amass an army for world domination, then it'd be better to use them in a more support/logistics role, like the potato farms.

I'd have to disagree...

Here's why.

You (as the military) could put out an online videogame. Put tons of money into the marketing/promotion, etc. and make it pretty big. Then, after just a little time, switch the program "on" by having some kind of major online event for folks with the game.

Secretly, the thumb jockeys are now piloting REAL combat drones that then are sent to the target area to simply blow the hell out of everything. Just like "zombie" shocktroopers, but without thecasualties (on your side). Little Timmy thinks he's flying over some alien landscape when he's really bombing downtown Tehran!

For the initial post though...impressive story...

[edit on 27-12-2006 by Gazrok]

Originally posted by Gazrok

ignorant_ape, TV children make terrible shock troopers. If you're trying to amass an army for world domination, then it'd be better to use them in a more support/logistics role, like the potato farms.

I'd have to disagree...

Here's why.

(snip)

Just like "zombie" shocktroopers, but without thecasualties (on your side). Little Timmy thinks he's flying over some alien landscape when he's really bombing downtown Tehran!

Yeah, but then they wouldn't be "Shock Troopers", they'd be support/logistics... in this particular case, the logistics of moving a flying bomb from Point A to Point B... btw, see "Toys" (the one with Robin Williams, not the Pixar flick). It exactly demonstrates your idea, and is the basis for my eventual UAV artilliary support when I try to achieve World Domination.

The type of zombie that you are talking about is a living zombie. Areal zombie is a corpse that has undergone a demonic /dark magic transformation induced by a spell cast upon a zoodoo doll within a pentagram. Or so I've heard.