But the zombies that invaded America in the 1930s came from Haiti. In 1929, American writer William Seabrook published a book called The Magic Island, a sensational account of his experiences among the Culte des Mortes or voodoo practitioners of Haiti. The book was popular and Seabrook's stories about zombies, dead men who had allegedly been restored to life to act as mindless laborers, caught the public imagination. Believers considered these resurrections magic while rationalists believed they were caused by a drug.

Although mostly forgotten today, Seabrook was a famous -- and somewhat notorious -- figure in his day. Best known as an author of exotic travelogues -- Adventures in Arabia and Jungle Ways -- he was part of the wide-ranging post-World War I literary and artistic circle that is usually called the Lost Generation. A friend and student of magician Aleister Crowley, Seabrook practiced a kind of bondage magick with a series of willing mistresses and wives. His occult enthusiasms bore fruit in his 1940 book Witchcraft, Its Power in the World Today, a stunning catalog of sorcerous practices from around the world. Seabrook's magic was based in psychology, on the innate power of the mind to exert its will over another's consciousness through the power of suggestion.

Perhaps the best and most notable of the 30s and 40s zombie flicks is I Walked with a Zombie, produced by Val Lewton and directed by Jacques Tourneur. With a plot borrowed from Jane Eyre, a script that is almost poetic, and beautiful, moody cinematography, Tourneur's film is probably the high tide mark of the old school zombie.