"Night of the Living Chainsaw Massacre: The Anniversary of Two Horror Classics" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "HAITIAN VODOU: An Introduction to Haiti's Indigenous Spiritual Tradition"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 1
Night of the Living Chainsaw Massacre: The Anniversary of Two Horror Classics
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October 1st carries an unusual
coincidence for horror fans: two of the genre's most influential films,
released six years apart, both had their very first public screenings on this
exact date. George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead opened at the Fulton Theater in
Pittsburgh on October 1, 1968. Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
opened in Austin, Texas, Hooper's own hometown, on October 1, 1974. It's a fun
bit of trivia on its own, but both films carry a genuinely occult wrinkle worth
unpacking, one folkloric, one closer to outright myth…
Start with the word most people
assume Romero's film is actually about. Night of the Living Dead is
routinely credited with inventing the modern zombie, the shuffling,
flesh-eating, plague-like undead that would go on to dominate horror cinema for
the next half-century. Here's the detail that tends to surprise people: the
word "zombie" never appears anywhere in the film itself. Romero's own
script and the film's original poster material refer to the creatures only as
ghouls. The zombie label was applied afterward, by critics and audiences
reaching for the closest existing word in the popular vocabulary, and that
borrowed word came loaded with an entirely different set of meanings Romero's
film has nothing to do with.
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The real zombie, as the term entered English, comes directly from Haitian Vodou, where it describes something quite specific and considerably less cinematic: a person who has been robbed of their own will, whether through poison, ritual, or spiritual affliction, and reduced to a subjugated, laboring existence, still alive rather than reanimated dead flesh. The concept entered American popular culture largely through William Seabrook’s 1929 travelogue The Magic Island, and it took on a life of its own from there, most famously investigated by the Harvard-trained ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who spent the early 1980s in Haiti researching the folk pharmacology, a tetrodotoxin-based powder among the ingredients most commonly cited, said to underlie real, documented cases of zombification. Whatever one makes of Davis's specific chemical claims, which have drawn real scientific pushback over the decades, the underlying Vodou concept he was investigating bears essentially no resemblance to what Romero put on screen. Romero has said in interviews that his actual inspiration was Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, a story about the last man alive in a world overrun by something closer to vampires, and Romero simply reimagined that premise as a mass phenomenon. The flesh-eating, contagious, reanimated-corpse zombie is, genealogically speaking, a vampire story wearing a name borrowed from a completely unrelated Haitian spiritual tradition, a borrowing that happened after the fact and without much apparent thought given to the tradition it was lifted from.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s
occult wrinkle runs in the opposite direction: not a folklore borrowed and
misapplied, but a documentary claim invented from nothing at all. The film
opens with a solemn title card informing audiences that what follows is a true
story, and that claim has been repeated so often in the decades since that a
genuine number of viewers still believe it. It is not true, and Hooper never
claimed otherwise once pressed on the matter; he's been open for decades that
the “true story” framing was a marketing decision, added because he believed,
correctly as it turned out, that audiences would find invented violence more
unsettling if they thought it had actually happened.
The film’s one real, if considerably more distant, connection to an actual criminal case is Ed Gein, the Wisconsin man arrested in 1957 whose farmhouse was discovered to contain furniture and objects fashioned from human remains taken from local graves. Hooper has said Gein was a loose, partial inspiration, specifically for the idea of a mask made from human skin, rather than any basis for the plot, characters, or setting of the film, all of which he and co-writer Kim Henkel invented independently. It’s worth being precise about Gein himself here too, since popular memory has inflated his case considerably: Gein was convicted of killing two women, not the dozens sometimes implied by his outsized cultural reputation, and despite persistent rumors at the time of his arrest, no credible evidence ever tied his crimes to organized occult practice, Satanism, or ritual magic of any kind. Psychiatric evaluation attributed his grave robbing and body modification to a severe, isolated psychological disturbance centered on his domineering, recently deceased mother, not to any coherent belief system, magical or otherwise. Gein's case has nonetheless proven to be one of the most quietly influential true crimes in horror history, feeding not only Leatherface but also Norman Bates in Psycho and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, three of the genre’s most enduring monsters drawn from one deeply disturbed man's very real, very small number of actual crimes.
What both films share, in the end, is
a kind of inverse relationship with the occult tradition their reputations lean
on. Night of the Living Dead borrowed a real spiritual tradition's
vocabulary for a monster with no genuine connection to it, and audiences have
spent half a century assuming the connection was intentional. The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre borrowed nothing but a title card's worth of false
documentary authority and a single detail from a genuine crime, and audiences
have spent half a century assuming the whole story happened. Both films remain
genuinely great, influential, era-defining horror on their own considerable
merits. Neither one needed the borrowed authenticity to earn that reputation,
and both are more interesting once you know exactly which parts were real.
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, we look at a true history of Haitian Vodou and its rich legacy...
HAITIAN
VODOU: An Introduction to Haiti's Indigenous Spiritual Tradition
By
Mambo Chita Tann | Llewellyn Publications
Today, in honor of the tradition
Romero's film borrowed a word from without borrowing anything else, we're
recommending a book that treats that tradition on its own terms.
Mambo Chita Tann's Haitian Vodou:
An Introduction to Haiti's Indigenous Spiritual Tradition, published by
Llewellyn in 2012, is exactly the corrective this post has been building
toward. Tann writes as a practitioner of the highest initiatory rank within the
tradition, and the book's entire project is respectful demystification,
presenting Vodou as the serious, coherent ancestral religion it actually is,
descended from the Vodu priesthoods of West Africa, rather than the collection
of horror movie tropes, pins, dolls, and shambling corpses American popular
culture has attached to the word for the better part of a century.
Readers coming to this book after
today's post will find the actual concept of zombification treated with none of
the sensationalism Hollywood built its reputation on. Tann situates it within
the tradition's real cosmology, alongside the lwa, the spirits at the center of
Vodou practice, ancestor veneration, and the ceremonial structures that
organize a working Vodou community, giving readers the context necessary to
understand why zombification, in its genuine form, functions as a matter of
spiritual and social consequence within Haitian belief rather than a
horror-movie set piece with no connection to anything real. The book covers the
tradition's history, its core beliefs, and its practices in a single accessible
overview, exactly the starting point most readers raised on decades of borrowed
and distorted terminology actually need.
This is an introductory overview
rather than a hands-on practical manual, and readers looking to actually work
within the tradition will eventually need deeper study and, ideally, direct
connection to practitioners and community, something Tann herself would likely
insist on rather than suggest a book alone could substitute for. But as a
first, genuinely respectful corrective to a lifetime of horror movie noise,
particularly for readers who, like most of us, first encountered the word
"zombie" through exactly the kind of film discussed above, Tann's
book is the right place to actually learn what the word meant before Hollywood
got hold of it.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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