Black Zombie Unearths The Ugly Truth Of An Iconic Horror Staple

It’s become a staple of the horror genre, as iconic and fantastical as the vampire or the werewolf. But like all bogeymen, the zombie was once a cipher for a more tangible, terrifying threat. The figure isn’t quite as old as Dracula or the Wolf Man — in fact, its origins might be too close for comfort, dredging up a part of history that most would rather forget: the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

“The zombie was actually a Haitian Vodou metaphor for slavery,” filmmaker Maya Annik Bedward tells Inverse. For enslaved Africans in Caribbean colonies like Haiti, the theft of one’s autonomy was akin to a walking death. But as that tale made its way stateside, and Haitian slaves rose up against their oppressors, it became a metaphor for the white audience’s fear of retaliation, perpetuated most successfully in horror films like White Zombie and The Serpent and the Rainbow.

“The taking of that story and bringing it to Hollywood is the kind of nexus of why we think of Vodou and most African spiritual traditions as ‘black magic,’” continues Bedward. “The zombie was that vehicle in those early films... even if we don’t know those early films.”

The Jamaican-French Canadian director has spent the past 10 years tracing the zombie from its Hollywood boom back to its roots in Haiti — and her debut feature, Black Zombie, excavates all that and more. Part pop-culture survey, part radical history lesson, the doc is dense in all the best ways. It’s shocking that there’s so much material to mine from a subject that most think they’ve figured out — but Black Zombie reveals just how much we have to learn about the zombie, its ties to the slave trade, and the sometimes insidious, sometimes unconscious ways it reinforced anti-Black prejudice. The documentary is sprawling, hopscotching from the late 18th century to 1980s Hollywood, from the streets of Paris to the set of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. It manages to tie every thread back to Haiti and its revolution, the first successful insurrection against colonial rule, back to the West’s need to punish the nation in any way possible. But weaving that web was much easier said than done.

“A lot of people [said], ‘Maya, this story you’re trying to tell is way too big,’” Bedward recalls with a laugh. The filmmaker felt a kind of duty to bring this story forward all the same, and it’s a good thing she did. Too long has this connection been buried, dramatized by sensationalists like William Seabrook — who introduced “zombie” to the English lexicon with his 1930s pulp novel The Magic Island — and even well-meaning horror savants like Wes Craven. In an interview with Inverse, Bedward breaks down the process of bringing this story to life and why the origins of the zombie are so important to wrestle with now.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What was the catalyst for this idea?

It’s definitely a passion project of mine. I’ve been working on it for almost 10 years. I’m Afro-Caribbean. My father was born in Jamaica, and I’ve always been really interested in the stories of our people, our history, where we come from, our culture, and its connections to West Africa. That’s always been a huge passion of mine. And often people would say, “Well, that history’s lost. Those traditions are lost. Those connections are lost. [Our history is told] through more of a colonial lens, or European lens.” As I grew up, I started to realize that’s not true. There’s a lot of pieces of our culture and history in our music, in our food, and most powerfully in our spiritual traditions. I’ve always been wanting to learn more about Vodou, Haitian Vodou, all of these pieces that I think have a lot of really powerful stories that are clues to where we come from.

When I found out the zombie was actually a Haitian Vodou metaphor for slavery… my mind was blown: “How did I not know the zombie actually has its roots in this history? It doesn’t seem like anyone else knows this story, except if you’re Haitian. And why is that?” I started to dig deeper and find out how the zombie came to be what we know today, … all of the connections and all of the different points in history where the zombie was taken and disparaged, and [how] Haitian cultural traditions and African-derived spirituality were disparaged, [and] I was like, “I have to tell this story.”

I love how you tie the zombie connection to so many things that feel unrelated but are actually all united in this idea of white power and fear of losing that. Did you ever have any struggles uniting the thread of Hollywood to the Haitian revolution, to the stigma Vodou practices face today, and [turning] it into something digestible?

It was a huge challenge. I knew there were always key parts to the story that I wanted. I always wanted to center the voices of Haitian Vodou practitioners. That was really important to me. And I always knew that White Zombie, the first zombie film that was inspired by The Magic Island — the book [by William Seabrook] that brought the zombie to the Western world — that would be important. I knew Night of the Living Dead was also going to be important. And I knew that Serpent and the Rainbow, that crazy book by that guy that was turned into that Wes Craven film, was also going to be important. So finding people related to those stories was really key.

It’s funny: the Seabrook story, I was like, “How am I going to tell this? Because this guy is dead.” I spoke to his son, who was actually so supportive of the film, but didn’t grow up with his dad, didn’t know his dad at all. And then my partner was just at a bookstore looking for books about zombies — as we do, because that’s been our life for the past 10 years. And the man who worked at this bookstore was like, “We don’t really have any books about zombies, but we do have this graphic novel about the guy who wrote a book about the zombies.”

My partner picked it up and was like, “Wait a minute, this is you. You wrote this book.” And that’s how we met Joe [Ollmann]: We feature his [graphic novel, The Abominable Mr. Seabrook], and we animate the illustrations in the film. Some of it was just serendipitous like that… But it was hard to distill all this information. A lot of people [said], “Maya, this story you’re trying to tell is way too big.” And I’m like, “I know, but I got to tell it.” I figured out how to do that by working with some great editors to parse the story with me. It was a challenge, but I think we did it.

What was the thing that you were most shocked to discover while you were researching and conducting interviews?

The fact that the zombie was connected to Haitian Vodou was a shock. But the taking of that story and bringing it to Hollywood is the kind of nexus of why we think of Vodou and most African spiritual traditions as “black magic.” The zombie was that vehicle in those early films. Even if we don’t know those early films — Magic Island, I Walked With a Zombie — we do know its repercussions. “Oh, Vodou, that’s evil. That’s black magic. That’s sorcery.” We know that it stayed. And that was really shocking to me.

There’s a beautiful moment in this where your interview subject is talking about voyeurism, and you kind of break the barrier between your narrative element, which dramatizes what enslavement looked like in Haiti, and the documentary material that you have. You kind of involve yourself in the story, and we see you for the first time. How did that idea come about?

I feel very connected to these stories, but I’m not Haitian, and I’m not a Vodou practitioner. I was very aware as I was making this film, like what is my place in this? How do I make sure that I’m sensitive [to] the traditions? How do I do this in a way that is respectful and honest and true? And so when I was doing the interview with the Vodou priest, Era Jasue, the moment you’re talking about… I wanted to be honest and transparent about the making of the film, because this film is about films. We’re constructing things. We’re building things. I’m telling this zombie story that’s inspired by what I’ve read and heard, but I’ve made this. I thought it was important to shed a light on that and to be like “This is a construction too,” and getting his honest answer about it was amazing. We have to be interrogating the films we watch and how they’re made and who’s making them and why. What’s their intention? You have to come from that place to kind of interrogate what you’re doing.

Were there ever moments where you were wrestling with that in the process of filming: “Is this the right path?”

Totally, totally. And a director’s No. 1 job is making decisions. Every decision, I think for some filmmakers, it’s just like, “Yeah, whatever’s cool.” But for me, [that’s] not the objective. It’s not whatever’s cool. Of course, I want to balance [that] this is a film about zombies, and I knew it was important to make all this history and all this information that people are learning digestible. And part of doing that is making sure it’s entertaining. So balancing the entertainment aspect of the film, and also the message and the history — and really the examination of white supremacy — that was hard as well. Often I was wondering if I was making the right decision. I have an advisory committee that I would show the film to to get their feedback and make sure that I was on the right track, constantly questioning.

Black Zombie premiered March 13 at SXSW. It does not yet have a distributor.