The myth of the zombie originated in Haiti in the 17th and 18th centuries when African slaves were brought in to work on sugar plantations under the rule of France. The slaves believed that if they ended their own lives by suicide they would be condemned to spend eternity trapped in their own bodies as the undead. This myth evolved in the Voodoo religion into the Haitian belief that corpses were reanimated by shamans The zombie concept eventually infiltrated western culture with the publication of the first example of zombie fiction in 1927, which was a book titled The Magic Island written by William Seabrook. The book was later adapted for cinema as the 1932 film White Zombie Directed by Victor Halperin and starring Bela Lugosi, it was the first feature-length zombie film, establishing the sub genre of zombies and paving the way for the zombie apocalypse in cinema