Scholars of Haitian culture have noted that the zombie represents, in this interpretive framework, the ultimate horror for people whose historical experience included actual enslavement — the horror of a living death, of a person reduced to a laboring body without autonomy or selfhood.

The zombie is a figure of violation, not primarily a figure of horror in the supernatural sense but a figure of political and social horror.

In African American folk tradition more broadly, the zombie concept existed alongside other concepts of the relationship between the living and the dead that derived from the complex mixing of West African religions, Caribbean traditions, and African American Christianity that characterized Black spiritual life in the South.

The belief that the dead could return, that the spirit world was in contact with the physical world, that certain individuals had unusual relationships with the boundary between life and death — these were elements of a spiritual worldview that provided frameworks for interpreting unusual experiences.