Dorothy Brush "Random Thoughts" Published March 24, 2004

What is it about zombies that intrigues us?

Do bad memories ever really vanish or are they just pushed into a dark corner of the mind waiting to pop out at unexpected moments to fill us with the same emotions we felt when they first appeared? I was only 10 years old when I encountered a bad memory. Good friends of my parents took me to a movie one night; I believe they chose the movie because it starred Maurice Chevalier, an always entertaining performer. But it was a double feature and the second show featured Bela Lugosi in White Zombie! The year was 1932 and that was the first zombie movie ever made.

I doubt if those folks had any idea what a zombie was. I didn't. The dictionary says it is the snake god of voodoo cults in West Africa, Haiti and southern United States. According to voodoo belief it is a supernatural power or spell that can enter into and reanimate a dead body.

Lugosi's character was a voodoo master in Haiti and he brought the dead back as laborers without souls to work in the sugar mills. Even in those early days of movies the transformation of corpses to drones was a horrifying idea to this youngster. And to see it all acted out before my impressionable eyes made it even worse. I have no memory of sharing the experience with my parents but instead pushed the strange goings on into a dark corner of my mind.

There it stayed, almost forgotten until in the '60s a British rock 'n' roll group had three top-10 hits that were played over and over on the radio. They called their group The Zombies and it seemed no matter where I turned the dial The Zombies were there.

Recently USA Today ran a long story about the revival of zombie movies. They quoted author Peter Dendle who wrote The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia as saying, "What zombie movies do for the human consciousness is to strip away layers of civilization."

Another author, Bryan Senn, who wrote a book on the subject, Drums of Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema said of zombies, "Zombies have long lives. It's both our fascination and fear of death that makes them so popular. We want to believe in something after death, but we sure don't want to be a zombie. They attract and repulse."

All these years later the most interesting thing to me is that this long remembered experience had no effect on my attitude toward death. Surrounded in my earliest years by wise family members and friends I learned by their example that death was a natural part of living and not to be feared. They planted in me their strong belief that there was something after death and it certainly wasn't zombies!

It was about the time I learned about zombies that a friend and I were wandering through our church cemetery reading grave markers. We stopped and read the inscription chiseled on one. Now I know it was a common poem used on stones in those days beyond recall but to two youngsters it was an important discovery.

Remember man as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I.
As I am now you soon shall be.
Prepare for death and eternity.

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Dorothy Copus Brush is a Fairfield Glade resident and Crossville Chronicle staffwriter whose column is published each Wednesday.