I based the zombies in my fictional world more on Haitian folklore than on the brain-eating ‘viral zombies’ based on Night of the Living Dead that are more popular. I’m not one of those people who think that ‘real’ mythology is better than modern fiction. It was just what I was more familiar with. Zombies in D&D seem to be a mixture of the two: they’re animated corpses rather than living people robbed of their will but, at least in the 1974 rules, salt will thwart them.
Anyway I was vaguely aware that an American had written a book arguing that Haitian bokors really had reduced people to a zombie-like state, but I assumed he was a crank.
It turns out that his name is Wade Davis, he’s actually qualified (Harvard funded his research in Haiti), and his argument is quite convincing. Having read everything I could find on the subject (for a university assignment) I’m unsure whether he’s right or not, but of course that doesn’t matter for the purposes of D&D. You can read one article about it all here.
The role-playing game Unknown Armies says that zombies are created through this treatment and social conditioning: “So now you have someone who’s been buried alive, beaten severely, and drugged. This treatment is already likely to give you someone shell-shocked enough to just follow orders. Just as powerful (in Haiti) is the culture. Everyone there knows what a zombie is, and how a zombie is supposed to act. When you wake up in a coffin, get dug up and beaten, you know what you’ve become. Everyone treats you like a zombie (they tie your jaw shut and boss you around) and it’s very hard indeed to escape that social conditioning” (Stolze, 2004).
That’s more or less what Wade Davis says.