Black Zombie opens and closes with a cinematic short story, shot in black and white. It’s a beautiful frame for a documentary that is itself an act of reclamation. Filmmaker Maya Annik Bedward, who has Afro-Caribbean-Canadian roots, has created a film that should be taught in schools.
This horror documentary’s premise is deceptively simple: The story of zombies is a tragedy. It unearths the buried origins of the zombie – not in Hollywood horror, not in Pittsburgh with George Romero, not in Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Instead, in the haunted sugar cane fields of colonial Haiti, where enslaved Africans made Haiti the most profitable colony in the world. Zombies are how the spiritual resistance of enslaved people was expressed, a religion the Western world has spent centuries misunderstanding on purpose. Because zombies are a big business. And an entire industry has been built on the tropes of voodoo to keep it that way.
The film moves with confidence through history and culture, weaving interviews with historians, Slash (an executive producer), and incredible footage. Excellent music enhances the entire experience, including the gorgeous, haunting vocals of one rightfully skeptical voodoo priest. We learn that William Seabrook introduced zombies to the Western world in The Magic Island, but he got it all wrong. A wave of appropriation followed White Zombie in 1932. The often-cited pinnacle of zombie films, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968, starred a Black man, and the story was shaped by white fear of civil rights. Haiti’s 500,000 enslaved people outnumbered white settlers 10 to 1, and zombie mythology was partly born as spiritual resistance, a way to hold power beyond the grave.
Haiti’s main religions are Catholicism and voodoo, though many practice the latter quietly, forced into secrecy by anti-sorcery legislation and colonization. “Zombie is the Haitian metaphor for slavery,” the director explained in the Q&A. The appropriation has been massive and the misunderstanding willful: Voodoo is not human sacrifice or devil worship. It is a religion of liberation, an amalgamation of West African cultures, and a deeply personal way to reconnect with ancestors and honor their extreme hardships. Bedward handles heavy historical material with genuine care and curiosity. Her deft hand keeps it all mesmerizing. “Our dead don’t go away,” one subject says. “They stay to watch over us.” It’s the film’s quiet thesis, and it resonates deeply.
Who are we, the film asks, if devoid of spirit? The story of the zombie is also a mirror for colonialism and white appropriation. And for who gets to tell a story and who gets written out. Black Zombie demands you reconsider both the horrors humans are capable of and the untold beauty of the living and the dead. It’s the rare documentary you want everyone you know to watch. And while you’ll never see a zombie the same way again, the new lens only makes them more captivating.
