We continue with John’s 1965 treatment for a proposed remake of White Zombie. In this next bit we meet the sinister Countess Valdera. John seems to be having a lot of fun with this assignment.
I’m having some trouble with the comments, but I hope to get everything fixed soon.
ADDENDUM: Everything seems to be working again. Comment away!
Very Cool!
Comment by Anthony — September 24, 2023 @ 2:24 pm
This treatment was written three years before George A. Romero redefined what a zombie is in the public’s mind with the movie Night of the Living Dead. Before Romero, zombies were slaves under the control of a voodoo priest, or oungan. After Romero, zombies were out of control predators, more of a mockery of the resurrection after Armaggedon. In fact, Romero’s movie never refers to the living dead as zombies. He called them ghouls. They were meant to be an infestation inspired in the vampires in the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.
Interestingly, UFO experiencers sometimes report seeing zombie-like apparitions. Whitley Strieber, author of Communion, reports the following sighting in his book Solving the Communion Enigma. It happened in the 1970s before he Knew he was involved in the UFO mystery. He had been living with his wife on the top
floor of an old building on Fifty-fifth Street near Ninth Avenue:
“…one night, I was taking out the garbage when I heard a peculiar
sound on the floor below us. I went downstairs and to my horror ended up
face-to-face with the sickest man I had ever seen.
He was so thin he was almost skeletonized. He looked like a
concentration camp victim. His eyes were dark hollows and he appeared to
be grimacing. Frankly, his face looked like something out of a horror film.
When he saw me, he began moving toward me. This explained the sound,
because he would move not by walking but by thrusting his midriff forward
with his legs spread, causing him to slide along the floor in jerks.
His eyes bored into me. Closer, his face appeared to be decayed.
I ran upstairs and locked the door. After a time, the slipping, sliding noise
came to it, then fell silent. We hid in that apartment like a couple of terrified
little mice.
The next day, I began to investigate. I asked the neighbors if they’d ever
seen him. Nobody had. I didn’t have the guts to knock on his door, but I
went down to the alley and looked up at his windows.
I was shocked and horrified to see that they were all boarded up with
plywood. New plywood, still fresh and golden. They had not been boarded
up for long.
I thought he must have some horrific skin disease. I worried about
infection. I wanted to know more.
But when I telephoned the landlord, he told me that the apartment was
vacant. I said that it was not vacant. There was somebody there and they
had boarded up the windows.”
A couple of nights later great smears of dripping blood appeared on the walls of the hallway. The police were called but apart from the blood there was nothing wrong, no injuries, no property damage, no witnesses. Nobody knew where the blood came from. The next day some cleaning men removed the boards of the apartment below revealing it as empty and dusty.
I believe John Keel also reports corpse-like apparitions in his books.
Comment by Mestiere — September 25, 2023 @ 8:22 am
I assume John was following White Zombie in his rewrite, but I haven’t compared them.
A possibly interesting zombie footnote: A few years ago, I translated the first book known to use the word “zombi,” The Zombie of Great Peru, written by a French conscript named Pierre-Corneille Blessebois in Guadeloupe in 1697. At that time, “zombi” meant an invisible spirit; its meaning changed over the years: https://blackscatbooks.com/2020/02/23/rise-shine/
Comment by Doug — September 28, 2023 @ 8:19 pm
Keel was definitely basing his treatment on White Zombie. I was comparing how the popular idea of a zombie at that time differed from today’s. In White Zombie the reanimated corpses are controlled by the voodoo master Murder Legendre. In Night of the Living Dead the dead are apparently reanimated accidentally by radiation from an exploding space probe returning from Venus. Those zombies are under nobody’s control.
More recently they have given up trying to explain how a corpse could be reanimated. In the first season of the TV show The Walking Dead there is a lame attempt —not used in the comic book the show is based on— to try to explain it as a virus engineered in France. But that is impossible. Viruses only survive on living tissue. So they haven’t mentioned it again. Now that a version of the show is set in France (The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon) perhaps they’ll revisit that explanation.
Very interesting the first use of the term zombie. According to French Wikipedia the author of that novel, Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, was a writer, gigolo, arsonist and murderer. He was arrested and sold as an indentured servant —a type of white slave— to the colonists of the Caribbean island of Guadalupe. There he seems to have heard about zombies from the black slaves. He came up with a scheme of passing himself off as a sorcerer. The Countess of Cocagne hears about him and seeks the help of his alleged supernatural powers to help her marry the son of Blessebois’s owner, the Marquis of Grand-Pérou, by bewitching him and killing his mistress. Blessebois satisfies the Countess’s wishes by doing several stagings and by simulating the appearance of a zombie. In a turnabout the Marquis then uses Blessebois to fool the Countess. The supposed supernatural going-ons attract the atention of the authorities, who arrest and imprison Blessebois. Less than seven years later the novel The Zombie of Great Peru, or The Countess of Cocagne appeared, presumably a retelling of his capers.
Comment by Mestiere — September 29, 2023 @ 8:50 am
If you’re interested, I talk more about The Zombie of Great Peru and Blessebois in this interview with Bill Ectric from a few years ago: https://www.redfez.net/nonfiction/interview-books-zombie-great-peru-pierre-corneille-blessebois-683
Comment by Doug — September 29, 2023 @ 10:28 am
Thanks for the link, Doug. That was a great read!
It’s amazing that rogues like Blessebois ever existed. His life might make a good movie.
Comment by Mestiere — September 29, 2023 @ 1:23 pm
I don’t know if I’d want to spend 90 minutes with Blessebois! Maybe he could be toned down so the audience doesn’t walk out…
Comment by Doug — September 30, 2023 @ 11:31 am
Maybe a Martin Scorsese sort of treatment. Making it exciting and a little funny like Wolf of Wall Street.
Comment by Mestiere — September 30, 2023 @ 3:30 pm
Well, get to work, then! For more info, see Frédéric Lachèvre’s biography of him (1927).
Comment by Doug — October 5, 2023 @ 1:36 pm