Like so many of the classic cinema monsters, the zombie genre repeatedly undergoes periods of transformation and yet, as argued by Kyle Bishop, one of the factors that differentiates it from these other monsters is that ‘it is the only supernatural foe to have almost entirely skipped any initial literary manifestation’, instead leaping from folklore directly to film (Bishop 2010: 12–13). While Bram Stoker's Dracula and, to a lesser degree, Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla, have been central texts for the vampire film from Nosferatu (1922) through to Penny Dreadful (2014–), Bishop argues that the zombie has ‘no germinal Gothic novel from which it stems, no primal narrative that establishes and codified its qualities and behaviors’ (Bishop 2010: 13). This does not mean, however, that the genre does not have any literary influences. Many scholars, including Bishop but also Roger Luckhurst and Alison Peirse, have demonstrated how White Zombie (1932), generally considered the first zombie film, was influenced by William B. Seabrook's Haitian travelogue The Magic Island (1929) (Luckhurst 2015/Peirse 2013). Peirse argues that ‘Seabrook's travelogue provided the discursive context for the film, a point confirmed by the extensive reprinting of extracts from The Magic Island in the film's pressbook’, acknowledging a direct correlation between the book and the film (Peirse 2013: 65). Furthermore, Luckhurst has unearthed a largely overlooked tradition of zombie stories emerging from the pulp presses of the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that these stories ‘alongside Seabrook's Magic Island, directly underpin the arrival of the zombie in American cinema just as the category of “horror film” was emerging’ (Luckhurst 2015: 59). As Luckhurst demonstrates, this tradition of pulp storytelling ‘follow[s] Seabrook very closely’ (Luckhurst 2015: 64), revolving around the Caribbean zombie in the form of a ‘being that hovered between life and death, the natural and the supernatural, and toyed with the gruesome prospect of being buried alive by nefarious native conspirators’ (Luckhurst 2015: 63). All of these narratives, as Bishop, Peirse and Luckhurst demon- strate, tap into colonial anxieties surrounding the Caribbean following the occupation of Haiti in 1915 by American military forces.