Black Zombie is a phenomenal documentary that captures a timeline of seesawing depictions and should be required viewing for filmmakers, especially those in the horror space.
Black Zombie looks at the origins of zombies that many fans of this horror genre do not know. Through dramatizations, interviews with Voudou priests/esses, film historians, and more, the film explores how the horror of zombies began and what it signified. It captures the innate horror of what zombies mean to Black people, particularly Haitians, who have a traumatic history of enslavement and colonial oppression. Black Zombie is a phenomenal documentary that captures a timeline of seesawing depictions and should be required viewing for filmmakers, especially those in the horror space.
Maya Annik Bedward (Farm Crime, BLK: An Origin Story) writes and directs this documentary that begins in Haiti, where zombies originated. Moving between then and now, they explain the brutality Black slaves faced in Saint-Domingue as they outnumbered white settlers almost 17 to 1, and the sense of what death meant. From there, Black Zombie charts the course toward the first zombie film and white author William Seabrook, who ingratiated himself into a culture to capitalize on it.
Black Zombie Shows White Terror Charting the First Films
The 1932 film White Zombie depicts white horror. Here, Black people turned into zombies for the purpose of labor on a sugar plantation is okay. It’s when the owner has designs on another white man’s fiancée that crosses the white moral line. As film historian and acclaimed author Tananarive Due (The Reformatory, Mazywood) points out about those early movies, the fear was not whether a zombie attacks a white person. Instead, it was whether they would become one. Black Zombie chooses an apt title to explore the cinematic history.
Zombies and the Evolution of Voudou
Voudou, according to Kaiama L. Glover, a professor of French and African Studies, is about “divine possession.” However, zombiism is the dissolution or removal of spirit, a dispossession that takes away who one is. The reason there is a connection to Voudou is that it would be someone skilled in Voudou who creates the zombie.
Because practicing Voudou meant death, and colonizers forced Catholicism on Haitians, many Haitians incorporated, and continue to incorporate, Catholic imagery. It was a way to avoid detection when practicing Voudou. Black Zombie helps audiences understand the “who” behind the creation of zombies and the role colonization continues to play even after it ended.
Black Zombie Shows Not All Americans, But Always America
After showing the creator behind the creation, Black Zombie charts the continued harm that white people inflict on the country. Although colonization ended, the United States used its military in Haiti. And with the implementation of laws making Voudou practice illegal, they forced Haitians back into labor. Sadly, it’s the same way America used loitering and vagrancy to implement the 13th Amendment against Black people in the United States. Those “lifeless eyes” were of someone who fought for freedom only to discover a white loophole snatching them back.
Romero’s Contribution
Zombies existed long before Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. But the zombie’s evolution can mean so many things depending on who wields the pen. George A. Romero and John Russo introduce flesh-eating zombies with this cult classic. It does not mean it’s the definition of a zombie or that’s all it is, despite what Leanne MacRae, a fan of the flesh-eating iteration, thinks. However, there is no denying that it added a unique twist and even more possibilities.
White Carrionism
Naturally, Black Zombie looks at the return to Haitian zombies. And, like the early films, it begins with a white man’s book adapted to film. Wade Davis wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow, which Wes Craven later turned into a horror film. It’s impossible not to roll your eyes when Davis criticizes the film, which does have a horror steeped in racist othering; he does not view any of his own actions or book as problematic.
Rather than feasting on the dead, white people feast on a living, breathing culture, garnering praise for their bravery to steep themselves within it, before retreating back with the money they earn. As Davis himself says, he didn’t criticize the film back then because of the money he got from it. Black Zombie removes the gloss from Hollywood films of yore and presents a truth few may be comfortable sitting with. That colonial nations, then and now, still find ways to punish and vilify the people of Haiti while also profiting off them.
Black Zombie looks at the beginnings of the zombie horror genre and its mainstay fascination with people now. They can be a metaphor for consumerism like in Dawn of the Dead. In a physical sense, they can tap into our fear of death and age, because zombies depicted onscreen now often exhibit physical decay, with flesh sagging and falling from their bones. But they can also be another way to discuss enslavement, loss of agency, and oppression. Black Zombie shows the inescapable quality of the zombie as the fear of the “other,” whether it’s harm at the hands of one or becoming one, and perhaps the zombie remains because prejudice and racism do.
