A closer look
Haitian Vodou features the concept of the bokor, a mystical sorcerer who supposedly resurrects the dead to use them as mindless, soulless laborers in the fields; ethnobotanist Wade Davis discovered in the 1980s that these zombies were not magically reanimated corpses, but living people heavily drugged with tetrodotoxin extracted from pufferfish, which mimics a death-like coma, and after being buried and dug up, the victims were kept in a constant state of delirium using a psychoactive plant called Datura stramonium, proving that the entire terrifying legend of the undead uprising is actually just an extremely elaborate, horrifically abusive labor exploitation scheme orchestrated with localized neurotoxins instead of dark magic
