Zombies ARE Real... Sort Of.

If there's any kind of movie that represents the horror genre, it's the quintessential zombie flick. Since the movie "White Zombie" opened in theaters back in 1932, countless variations have flooded our screens with mindless animated corpses, hungry for human flesh.

Then again, "performing his every desire" sounds a lot more like something a prostitute would do.

But these are just movies, made by stereotypical asshole bigshot Hollywood executives. Zombies aren't actually real and so they are nothing to be worried about...

Except if you listen to certain people, they are, and there totally is.

You see, back in 1937, a Haitian woman by the name of Felicia Felix-Mentor was walking the streets and eventually made her way home to her husband. There wouldn't typically be anything unusual about this, except for the fact that despite her family's disbelief, she died in 1907.

Initially, Ms. Felix-Mentor died of an unconfirmed illness that, in Haitian mythology, was believed to make someone susceptible to being what we now call a zombie.

A doctor examined her and wrote:

"Her occasional outbursts of laughter were devoid of emotion, and very frequently she spoke of herself in either the first or the third person without any sense of discrimination. She had lost all sense of time and was quite indifferent to the world of things around her."

Ok, so not quite the rotting corpse or flesh eating zombie we all know and love, but we're getting closer.

Fast forward to 1985, a scientist named Wade Davis published "a pharmacological case for zombies" across two books. Earlier, in 1982, Davis traveled to Haiti (What? Again?) on an investigation of this phenomenon, and his research found that a person could actually be turned into a zombie via a combination of two powder-like drugs, usually introduced into the blood via an open wound. 

Hey, everyone's doing it!

The active ingredients in these powders were tetrodotoxin (TTX), which is a neurotoxin that comes from the puffer fish, and the second ingredient is usually a "dissociative drug", such as datura. Together, these drugs were reported to induce a state similar (at least to the untrained eye) to death, and make the victim totally obedient on the "bokor" (or Haitian witch-doctor).

Davis described a period of 'suspended-animation', in which medically, the victim is claimed to be dead, then "re-awakens". By this time, the victim is often buried already, adding to the "shit your pants" factor.

Clearly, the medical definition of "living" has been expanded a hell of a lot since then.

These people were usually subjected to years of servitude (which is the nice way of saying "slavery") to their bokors, and the dogma of Haitian mythology was partially responsible for making the victims believe they were "dead", and thus in combination with these drugs, acted accordingly.

However, Davis' work was highly criticized by the scientific community (and rightly so), since his sample size was effectively "one" (he only investigated one victim), and didn't really delve into much detail. Additionally, many psychiatrists and psychologists assert that the combination of these drugs alone do not have the capability to turn someone into a zombie, and that there must have been other neurological conditions, such as "schizo-genesis", which has been found to cause some symptoms of "zombie-like" behavior in people.

It seems it's more likely that the very few cases we have are a result of a chance combination of factors involving a pre-existing neurological disorder, a cocktail of drugs, and a (somewhat) willing participant. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how much of a sadistic asshole you are), there isn't much chance of a zombie apocalypse occurring anytime soon.

Max Reason.