After watching The Truth about Zombies, I learned things about zombies I didn’t know. People in Haiti, where Voudoun is practiced, fear zombification more than they fear zombies. Zombies are fairly harmless, since they are ppl who have been poisoned so that they suffer paralysis, but with total consciousness and awareness. But what was most interesting to me was that zombification is a form of capital punishment visited upon ppl who have done some harm to people in the community, but who have not been served by the justice system. So it is a punishment meted out by an extra-legal Voudoun justice system. The adjudicator, in addition to zombifying the perp, takes their will, their “petit bon ange”, and keeps it in a bottle.
Caterina.net 
eeeeeek. that’s got to be one of my biggest fears. it’s like locked-in syndrome.
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Two-minute lectures, cool! What’s with the ppl spelling?
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For more on the subject, try “The Serpent and The Rainbow” (1985 — also made into a cheezey horror-type movie). I read it shortly after it came out, I remember it as a good read.
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I served in the Peace Corps in Haiti and I after establishing some credibility with my language instructor I decided it was time to start asking some questions about voodoo, which Peace Corps administration had guided us to avoid in normal conversation. This man was a thoughtful, intelligent, practical person and he told me after I asked that he knew a zombie and it was really sad. This person had been a friend of his and now he was just a , well, a zombie. I read Serpent and the Rainbow as well and I remember understanding in some basic way that it sounded incredible but maybe it was possible that a person could be chemically induced into such a state.
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