The Zombie Horde

Chapter 3 examines the zombie horde avatar, an iconic trope that first emerged in contemporary US visual culture in the late 1960s, by focusing on its nearly simultaneous rise in Haitian literature in the 1970s. Why, in contrast to earlier representations in which Haitian zombies typically appear individually or in small groups, did zombie hordes began invading Haitian novels by writers such as Frankétienne and Dany Laferrière only six years after George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead represented voracious living dead masses? While scholars have noted the connection between Duvalier and the zombie’s appearance in Haitian literary fiction, this chapter connects the emergence of the living dead horde to both local and global contexts, showing how Haitian authors’ use of the trope is at once a critique of local socio-political concerns and tied to the era’s global social uprisings and Cold War–era anxieties, which also gave rise to the rabid masses of Night of the Living Dead.