One of Amazon’s best-selling Halloween getups this season is a deluxe zombie costume. Designed for boys ages 3 to 16, it features a tattered shirt that reveals the zombie’s plastic bones, and a hood over a skeletal mask. An ax is included.

The costume represents the zombies we know from movies and TV: scary creatures that used to be dead people and have come back to life. Yet according to a new exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, “Zombies: Death Is Not the End?” (through Feb. 16, 2025), that representation is a distortion.

Zombies are actually a group of people in present-day Haiti who number around 50,000 and who were never dead, the exhibition explains. Many of them were, rather, subjected to a form of religious punishment known as zombification: drugged, buried alive, then exhumed in a state of stupor, and enslaved.

The Western notion of the zombie as a resurrected corpse is a fantasy propagated by Western popular culture, the show’s curators argue, devoting an entire section to the movies, music, comic books and novels that have kept that fantasy alive.

The West’s enduring zombie myth “has long served to mock, stigmatize and lampoon Haitian culture,” said Philippe Charlier, the exhibition’s lead curator. “It’s unfair, and it’s wrong.”