Black Zombie (Imagine Film Festival 2026)

It’s important to have representation in cinema, even if ’80s haunted-generation dorks like me are obviously not the main subject of Maya Annik Bedward’s documentary, Black Zombie. While I expected it to shine the spotlight on some marginal experiences, watching Newsnight and being blindsided by a scary segment was not among them, the show’s 1980s theme crashing without warning into Black Zombie, heralding a report on Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis’ famous discovery that the Haitian belief in zombies had a factual basis. There was, in fact, a chemical called tetrodotoxin, which could send its victims into a death-like coma so convincing, they were often buried to be later dug up by the poisoners, by which time they believed themselves to be undead slaves.

I say “discovery”, but obviously Davis wasn’t the first person as the Haitians knew all about it, and this paradox – how something that’s already widely known in a different culture can distort as it passes between cultures – is the core subject matter of Black Zombie. The title pointedly inverts the 1932 film White Zombie, the Bela Lugosi vehicle that brought voodoo to American cinema screens, and as Bedward’s film reveals, it has an even greater historical significance than you might think. White Zombie was adapted from William Seabrook’s The Magic Island, which holds the distinction of being the first English-language book to use the word “zombie”.

If this leads you to assume Seabrook had a sensitive, nuanced understanding of different faiths and societies, prepare yourself for disappointment. Unpicking the life of The Abominable Mr. Seabrook (to quote the title of the 2017 graphic novel biography by Joe Ollmann, who is one of the many great interviewees here), makes for one of the most blackly funny stretches of Bedward’s documentary. Described as an alcoholic and sadomasochist, to put it bluntly, Seabrook comes across as an absolute charlatan – his book packed with racist verbal and visual caricatures of Black Haitians. Most culpably, it’s pointed out that he completely misses the concrete connections between the servile, enslaved zombies and the American sugar corporations who all but ran Haiti during the 1915-1934 American occupation.

This, it’s rightly noted, is the real horror underpinning those early zombie movies – a race-reversed form of slavery where the enchantment of voodoo allows villainous Black sorcerers to turn innocent (usually female), Caucasians into enslaved White Zombies. Then, everything changes when George A. Romero comes on the scene, and it’s possible to imagine Night of the Living Dead being made today and being accused of cultural appropriation. It’s one of the only classic movie monsters that isn’t rooted in European folklore or literature, and it gets its Blackness removed and gets transplanted to Pennsylvania? Except of course, Night of the Living Dead is an actively anti-racist zombie movie – something that would have seemed like a contradiction in terms during the first half of the 20th century. The question of whether Romero meant it that way is often debated, and both sides of the argument are examined here, but having seen such an in-depth critique of the early American zombie narratives, there’s a certain thrill in seeing Night of the Living Dead co-writer John A. Russo cheerfully accept due credit for knocking it all down and replacing it with a better, more subversive myth.

This is where Black Zombie‘s narrative control falters a little for me, because if this were merely a cultural history of zombie fiction, Romero’s work and the later zombie classics by Lucio Fulci, Edgar Wright, Max Brooks et al. would be the most important part of the story. Instead, it’s about the intersection between zombie fiction and Haitian religion, and in this context chronicling the post-Romero zombie wave feels like a dead end. It’s not as if the film becomes less interesting as, if anything, it becomes more attention-grabbing – if only on a superficial level. Historical documentaries always have to find a way to make going over old documents feel visually impactful, so the opportunity to use that excerpt where Joseph Pilato gets ripped in half in Day of the Dead is understandably hard to resist. Interviewees like Thea Munster, founder of the famous Zombie Walk events, acknowledge the Haitian roots of what is now a very pop-cultural phenomenon, and agree that there needs to be a reconnection with the religion that gave birth to all this, but Black Zombie has little to say about the likes of The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later because those works clearly have little to say about voodoo.

Fortunately this is merely the end of the second act and the final third of Black Zombie goes back to Haiti to examine the aftermath of two types of colonialism – the literal, economic kind that brought us the Haitian American Sugar Company, and the cultural kind that birthed William Seabrook. It explores the Catholic reskins of voodoo, which the film argues were created as a cover story for voodoo practitioners during the years of occupation that have now their own distinct faith traditions, and it ends with a visual coup, the whole argument of the film in one cut. Bedward takes us from the black, unknowable, and fearsome Carribbean sea of White Zombie to the clear blue sea of the real Haiti – an image that recalls similar moments in Moonlight and Daughters of the Dust and serves as the perfect capper to this necessary, informative film.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – BLACK ZOMBIE