Near the end of Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie, we see a clip from Family Feud, the American game show where contestants guess the most popular answers to survey questions.
“Name something you know about zombies,” host Steve Harvey asks.
“Black,” shrugs a WASP-y looking contestant. She smiles a plastic smile as Harvey looks at her, clearly uncomfortable.
“The contemporary zombie is unrecognizable from its roots in Haiti,” film historian Tananarive Due notes earlier in the film. Indeed, the weight and meaning of the contestant’s answer might be lost on many young horror fans, to whom it might seem random. This is why Bedward places the clip at the very end of her documentary, after she has carefully guided viewers through the birth, death and living-death of the zombie. We arrive at a place where we can immediately understand how decades of fear and racism might have shaped the contestant’s answer.
The key word here is “understand.” For the project of Black Zombie is not to upbraid those who are not familiar with the historical and symbolic meaning behind the zombie — a monster that, thanks to the likes of George A. Romero and Lucio Fulci, haunts our nightmares. Rather, the film’s project is to address a glaring blind spot for many fans of the horror genre.
“Know the story,” a Vodou priest advises. Bedward triumphantly obliges.
Black Zombie works because it gives Haitian people, specifically practitioners of the Vodou religion, the opportunity to tell their story — a story of their spirituality and how they became monsters in the eyes of white culture — on their own terms. As such, Black Zombie is a masterpiece.
As with most of our cultural monsters, the zombie’s story is multifaceted and complex. Through interviews with historians, religious leaders, and filmmakers, Bedward shows how the Vodou religion formed after the French violently uprooted and enslaved people from different parts of Africa, and transported them to modern-day Haiti. Once there, they came together to develop Vodou, a spiritual practice that facilitates communion with the divine.
According to Vodou belief, after death, a person’s soul is returned to their homeland in Africa. But if a person does something bad in life, they may be doomed to enslavement in the afterlife: to zombification. Becoming a zombie — a Haitian term for an animated corpse — is something to be avoided at all costs.
Zombification, therefore, is a metaphor for the condition of enslavement. Ripped from communities and land, and robbed of their autonomy, enslaved people were also robbed of their spirit by forced work and unchecked violence.
Over time, this metaphor for enslavement transformed into a monster, thanks to an American explorer and travel writer named William Seabrook, who spent time observing Vodou practitioners who worked at a sugar company in Haiti. Eventually, Seabrook wrote a book in 1929 telling the world that zombies were real. The book was turned into a movie, and Hollywood has never looked back.
For Haitians, zombification was a nightmare, but early Hollywood took this fear and turned it against them. The zombie became the white man’s scapegoat, the racial other; in films, Black actors were frequently cast as zombies attacking white folk.
Vodou as a religion thus transformed into something devilish in Western pop culture. “They literally saw blackness as evil, and our religion as evil,” says Due. “Blackness and Vodou became the monstrosity of the [zombie] story.”
Bedward’s filmmaking has a subtle poetry to it, an aching understanding. She shows through delicate but trenchant interviews with Vodouists, and through reenactments — of what zombification would have meant for a slave; what searching for life amidst colonial death would look like — that the zombie’s story is also the story of Haiti.
After the Haitian Revolution at the end of the 1700s – a successful slave uprising against the French colonizers in Saint-Domingue, a lucrative sugar plantation – France forced Haiti to pay reparations to French slaveholders, leaving the young state with a devastating debt that would shape its future.
Black Zombie shows how communal spirituality today allows for the Haitian people to mount a spiritual resistance to colonial narratives foisted upon them, to maintain their humanity in the face of the deadening trudge of the zombie.
Though meticulous in her research, Bedward’s singular genius lies in her depiction of Vodou’s glimmering beauty, through which she helms a scathing critique of Hollywood’s favourite lumbering monster.
My only issue with the film is that even as it takes prominent twentieth-century white creatives to task for their exploitation of Haitian culture, it doesn’t ask contemporary white horror fans about how they might reckon with this troubling cultural history.
For example, the film shows a horror fan who dresses up as a zombie and walks around scaring people. The fan says that she likes zombies because their only purpose is to eat people. Bedward also shows clips from popular “zombie walks” to show how far the figure has crawled from its historical underpinnings. I wish Bedward had further challenged these interviewees, asking them how they feel working within this story about displacement and deadening. But through clever juxtaposition, Bedward shows that remaining uninformed is largely a white privilege.
“It can’t be underestimated the ways in which culture can do the work of statecraft,” says professor of French and African studies Kaiama L. Glover in the film. And of course she’s right – many of our monsters are embodiments of cultural anxieties; they represent the colonizer’s fears about having done to them what their ancestors did to others.
Coming from a filmmaker with an intuitive knack for telling stories with fulsomeness and respect, Black Zombie is a towering achievement and a scintillating reminder that the only way toward conscientious or impactful storytelling is to remember where we have come from. Know this story.
