I’m not aware of too many documentaries that cover the entire history and evolution of zombies in popular media the way that Black Zombie does. There is no shortage of documentaries that celebrate the horror genre and its many classics over the years, seeking to highlight the breadth of social commentary and thematic material that separates great art from the rest. But very few introspect within the genre, back to the origins of some of its popular tropes and attempt to deconstruct and analyze why our current conceptions of such tropes are the way that they are.
Black Zombie looks within, and begins by taking us back to the Haitian origins of the zombie. Old Voudou traditions speak of a way to bring the dead back to life, essentially becoming slaves ready to do the bidding of whoever is in control. Eventually during the American occupation of Haiti from the mid-1910s to 1934, you had a number of supposed sightings of “zombies” working the plantations, run by the Americans themselves. The most popular case retelling comes from William Seabrook’s book The Magic Island, which became a bestseller in America. Thus our current notion of the zombie was born – not directly through Haitian folklore, but rather by the accounts of the white men who came to Haiti to witness a supposed phenomenon that may have been the result of exploitation under the hands of the Americans anyways. This “zombification” is really the result of returning to slave-like conditions after so many decades removed from the Haitian Revolution.
Next we move onto the genre’s present-day depiction in cinema, where the original conception of zombies becomes warped through the lens of such films like White Zombie. We witness the emergence of racist tropes, like saving the white lady from the big bad black man who had been possessed by voodoo magic. And while the next few decades saw the zombie trope evolve and shift away from its original Hollywood conception through films such as Night of the Living Dead, the exploitation and misinterpretation of Vodou practices and traditions in popular culture continues time and time again as the genre became increasingly popular. This is the crux of the film’s thesis – and it is a very compelling thesis for something that has become so ubiquitous throughout popular culture in Western media.
There are plenty of interesting and also fun moments here. A standout for me was the Wade Davis segment. During the Q&A, the director stated that she barely got a couple questions in before he just started rattling on for hours. There’s a damning slip-up where he first criticizes Wes Craven for his film adaptation of his book The Serpent and the Rainbow exploiting the same racist Hollywood tropes in contrast to what his book was about, in a manner that you’d expect from a renowned anthropologist. And yet by the end Davis wants to let you know that he bought a house with the money he made off of it. In other words, he’d like you to know that he’s not racist, even though he’s not any better than the people whom he is criticizing, and in spite of the fact that he’s a Harvard trained anthropologist!
But of course, Davis’s admission reminds me of myself – I get the general argument, yet I’m still going to watch and consume zombie media because zombies are fun and very iconic within popular culture at this point. Does that make me a hypocrite? Or racist, just like the rest of us? I don’t know. I’m not sure that the film seeks to condemn those who are zombie lovers – even if director Maya Annik Bedward acknowledges that she wasn’t a zombie fan growing up. But one thing this film will make you do is to critique and question your relationship to the media you consume and the way you look at zombies going forward. And any film that can shake up your thinking – as this film has done for me – is well worth your time.