The Taken Dead in Haitian Vodou

In Haitian Vodou, a zombi is understood as a person whose soul has been separated from their body, most often described as the deliberate act of a bokor, a Vodou ritual specialist who works with darker or more transactional forms of power than a houngan or mambo typically does, leaving a body that can be commanded to labour without will of its own. This is a serious, specifically Haitian theological and social concern, not a generic monster category, and it carries direct historical weight: fear of zombification in Haitian folk memory is widely connected by scholars to the trauma of chattel slavery, in which a living person's labour and autonomy were already stripped from them entirely, so the zombi condition reads within Haitian culture as slavery's afterlife, a loss of self that continues even past physical death.

Haitian law has historically treated zombification as a real, prosecutable act in some contexts, reflecting that the belief operates within an actual social and legal framework in Haiti rather than existing only as folklore, and Vodou practitioners themselves generally treat the subject with considerable seriousness rather than as entertainment.