I've spent months reading every anthropological
and ethnographic report on the Haitian zombie.
Researching the pharmacology, toxicity, and biosynthesis of TTX.
Pouring through books on occult magic
medicinal plants of the Caribbean, animal sacrifice,
voodoo theology, and African folklore.
Hoping to grasp the strange phenomenon of zombification.
You always have to investigate the belief system that
mediates the pharmacological event or the pharmacological possibility
so that really led to the second phase of the investigation
of what is a zombie and the quintessential act
of making a zombie is a magical act.
Haiti was once one of the most valuable pieces of land in the world
exporting well over 100 million pounds of sugar each year,
in addition to the finset indigo, coffee,
and tobacco plants with the largest leaves in the Caribbean.
Today, after centuries of kleptocratic politicians
and religious oppression, Haiti is the poorest country
in the western hemisphere.
The city is unimaginably chaotic.
The streets, alleys, and canals are littered with the skin
of organic matter.
Peels, husks, and shells of every imaginable food
line the sides of the road, waist-high, like snowbanks.
The past 100 years have been especially turbulent for Haiti,
including more than 10 US military interventions,
and an occupation from 1915 to 1934.
US marines returned home with weird tales of potions,
black magic, and the living dead.
They published their stories in pulp novels
which served to inspire a series of horror movies
in doing so, sculpting the American concept of the zombie.
Charles Addams was a frequent guest at the Oloffson hotel
and used its facade to inspire the Addams family mansion.
The gothic gingerbread architecture
bursts with every sort of Victorian ornamentation imaginable.
Fretworks, bandrils, dentate bargeboard pendants,
open work lintels, turned wood balusters, gabled dormers,
and spires clad in corrugated iron.
Essentially, it looks like a giant haunted doily.
Each night I sleep in the Jean-Claude Van Damme suite
named in honor of the great Belgian martial artist
and star of Timecop.
I walk downstairs
and meet my guide and bodyguard Alex,
who is going to take me to a voodoo ceremony
deep in the hills of Port-Au-Prince.
Hey, what's going on?
It's a pleasure to meet you.
Yes, yes, yes.
Good, good. How are you?
Alright.
He's a very large man.
He tells me that he was shot in the face 14 times.
Twice in the eye,
and it makes it difficult for him to drink alcohol.
He also tells me Haiti is the only place
on earth where people can fly.
What time is it, that the show starts?
10 to 7
In Haiti, conversations is vastly between rational
and utterly fantastical.
I remember the first week or so I was in Haiti
I just felt I was just blown away by the sense of the spiritual.
Where did we get this idea of voodoo as kind of evil?
Or black magic? It really goes back to
the fact that if you are to name the great religions of the world
what do you say? You know, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism,
Islam, Hinduism, whatever.
There's always one continent left out
in Sub-Saharan Africa, the tacit assumption being that
black people had no religion.
Well of course, by ethnographic definition they did.
Voodoo is much more than zombiefication and poisoning
in fact these are fringe matters most priests do not concern themselves with
Tonight we've been invited to attend a biyearly ceremony
to celebrate Baron Samedi, the god of the graveyard.
They paint sacred symbols, or veves, on the ground
with powdered cornmeal.
Each veve symbolizes a different loa, or god.
Each room of the peristyle has a shrine adorned with human skulls,
swords, crutches, potions,
and bottles of Carlo Rossi filled with the extract of 21 hot peppers.
The loa must be fed.
I smoke several fat j's
and begin to appreciate the power of the music even more.
The ceremony is a true feat of religious endurance
lasting well over 8 hours.
A woman straddles a child's chair,
her face contorted,
she's wincing and bouncing as if the chair itself were possessed.
For reasons that are slightly unclear
the loa of love, Erzulie, asks for my hand in marriage.
I'm hesitant at first,
Alex informs me that if I ever have sex on a thursday again
for the rest of my life, I will be killed.
I ask for a moment to consider my options
but am given no choice
and accept Erzulie's hand in marriage.
As an offering to the Petro loa
a well-fed sow is led into the center of the peristyle.
The music stops.
They saw open the pig's throat with a dull knife
digging around in its neck
pulling out veins and arteries like wires from a circuit breaker
while draining its blood into a large ceramic dish.
This is a sacred act
not of animosity but of love and tenderness.
The pig is now an ambassador
serenely ascending into the heavens with a message for the gods.
A man is mounted by a loa.
He fills his mouth with a cheeseburger size pile of burning embers
and begins to wildly spit sparks
with strands of black saliva dripping down his face.
He eats not just a piece of coal,
but a three course meal consisting entirely of burning embers.
It would be a great understatement to stay
I am very impressed.