(Above) from an Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) painting. 

"'For the script, Curt Siodmak all but ignored the original short story and came up with his own idea. Remembering the
painter Oscar Kokoschka, who used to sleep with a life-sized doll, he
developed the story of "a beautiful wife married to a
plantation owner on one of the voodoo islands. The husband knew that she wanted to run away from him. He would not let her go. So he turned her into a zombie. He could continue to have an affair with a beautiful body, but it was like
sleeping with a lifeless doll.'

'...Lewton turned
around and hired another writer who
made the film into a sort of 'Jane Eyre in the Tropics.'"

From Andrew Horn's retrospective on Zombie from the 1988 Berlin Film Festival.

"Carre-Four," the zombie which guards the paths leading to the Houm Fort, is apparently named from the French word, carrefour, meaning, literally, "cross road."