Dead Run - How did movie zombies get so fast? By Josh Levin
"For years, the fast zombie was by definition an oxymoron. The word itself can be traced to Creole and West African Bantu and the legend that a voodoo priest could hypnotize a corpse to obey his commands. In Hollywood's not-so-culturally-sensitive early zombie flicks, magically induced catatonia was featured more prominently than reanimation. Bela Lugosi's evil sorcerer 'Murder' Legendre hypnotizes Haitian sugar harvesters in White Zombie (1932) so that they grind cane into the wee hours without complaint. Jacques Tourneur's I Walked With a Zombie (1943) centers on a woman who's either the victim of island voodoo brainwashing or just really, really frigid and unresponsive."
