"In Haitian folklore, for instance, zombies do not physically threaten people; rather, the threat comes from the voduon practice whereby the sorcerer (master) subjugates the individual by robbing the victim of free will, language and cognition. The zombie is enslaved."

— Justin D. Edwards, “Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas” in Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture.

EDIT: ACK, hit enter too soon.

The interesting things of Zombies in the US is how there’s two very distinct origins - you have the haitan, which rose from the fear of and consequences of the transatlantic slave trade, but then you have Romero’s zombies, which aren’t slaves, but literal ravenous unthinking hordes devouring everything in their path while the survivors fragment and destroy themselves, which has morphed from a condemnation of individuality, to a fear of communism to a condemnation of capitalism to a condemnation of social media (he made that metaphor work hard, dammit!)

Romero pretty much just made disaster films that showed how shite we can be if we don’t pull together, with zombies as the disaster