With Night Of The Living Dead, director George A. Romero achieved the near-impossible: an independently made, high-minded genre movie that was also a blockbuster success. All horror lovers want hoity-toity adults to admit there’s artistic merit to their bloodlust, and Romero made it undeniable. He invented a genre on his own terms, though “invented” is a slippery term. Titles such as I Walked With A Zombie and White Zombie predate Romero’s film (which, in turn, was heavily inspired by Richard Matheson’s post-apocalyptic novel I Am Legend) by about 30 years. These weren’t undead lurchers who slowly stalk and kill the living. These zombies involved voodoo.
Black Zombie, a documentary from Maya Annik Bedward, digs up the proto-Living Dead to find the cultural erasure of the Vodou zombie, a case of cultural appropriation that codified the genre’s rules while excising its Haitian roots. Yet, even as a new wave of zombie movies lurch into theaters, the same harmful stereotypes that directors like I Walked With A Zombie‘s Val Lewton helped popularize back in the day—demonizing Haitians, African diaspora religions, and various aspects of Afro-Caribbean culture—persist.
But there’s plenty of meat left on the original zombie’s bones, even if predominantly white studio executives and filmmakers might not be the best to handle such a racially charged idea. Sure, zombie movies are transitory metaphors at the best of times, but even though we’re living in a time of renewed anti-Haitian racism as tech overlords algorithmically control our thoughts, opinions, and speech, these films continue pulling from Romero’s post-apocalyptic vision of societal collapse.
Black Zombie traces the genre back to the racist travelogues of William Seabrook, who introduced Haitian zombies in the “Dead Men Working In The Cane Fields” chapter of his 1929 bestseller, The Magic Island. To Seabrook, the Black fieldworkers he observed were so inhuman they must be under a spell. The pre-Code adaptation of this book, 1932’s White Zombie, would become a minor classic, thanks in no small part to Bela Lugosi, who, a year after Dracula, starred as “Murder” Legendre. The original zombie wasn’t a Dawn Of The Dead mall dweller or Shaun’s best friend Ed. The original zombie was enslaved.
Not all filmmakers have avoided the third rail of Vodou. Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci’s Dawn Of The Dead pseudo-sequel Zombi 2 sends a party of white travelers to the Caribbean to survive gory sacrifices and rituals. Wes Craven’s The Serpent And The Rainbow—loosely based on the controversial non-fiction of ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who spent years trying to prove the efficacy of a dead-raising “zombie powder”—turns Davis’ exploits into a late-’80s update of The Magic Island.
By side-stepping Vodou, Romero built his undead into a constantly shifting metaphor. In Dawn Of The Dead it’s consumer culture. In Day Of The Dead, it’s a Danny Boyle-like question of who should rule the new world and decide upon the old one: a power-hungry military or the empathetic scientific experts looking to find humanity in the dead. The zombie is a vague, unstoppable force that is either joined or, maybe, survived. More recently, the Romero-style zombie has primarily been the domain of television. The Walking Dead is still getting its steps in with three spin-offs, while The Last Of Us is HBO’s prestige genre blockbuster during Game Of Thrones‘ off-years. The latter adapts one of the world’s most beloved video games, a medium we can thank for the whole 2000s zombie boom. To that end, and showing how stuck zombie movies are in a very specific cul-de-sac, 1996’s Resident Evil will now see its film universe rebooted for the second time in five years.
Horror is currently Hollywood’s most important genre. But for all the Obsessions and Conjurings, zombies are on the outside looking in. None of the recent attempts to revive them have compelled audiences, because the genre is still preoccupied with what happens after society collapses. Modern audiences know what happens after a viral outbreak destroys society. It’s time for some new ideas to freshen up the genre—and by “new,” we mean the oldest ideas in zombie fiction. Nearly 100 years after the genre’s birth, it’s time for it to reckon with its past. The right filmmaker could return to The Magic Island not to propagate its stereotypes but to finally grapple with where the zombie came from and what it actually means.
The “Dead Men Working In The Cane Fields” weren’t dead. They were victims of state violence, arrested for their religious beliefs, and forced into labor. Movies like White Zombie take the perspective of the white vacationer, rather than of the people who had been enslaved. What if being turned into a zombie was a strategy enacted by a malevolent force? Earlier this year, Gore Verbinski’s zombie-adjacent Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Dieapproached what the Vodou zombie might look like today, where tech companies use addictive algorithms to encourage outrage, scapegoating, and hate. The leap from The Magic Island to the present-day United States isn’t a drastic one. President Donald Trump uses the debate stage to accuse Haitian immigrants of eating pets; Elon Musk, the racist owner of one of those addictive, rage-inducing websites, warns of invading hordes endangering innocent whites. The tropes haven’t changed, the metaphor is obvious, and, as Black Zombie makes clear, a reckoning is long overdue.
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