Bedward's 'Black Zombie' Doc Traces Zombies To Haitian Vaudou — SkimNews
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- Black Zombie, Maya Annik Bedward's new documentary, examines how Hollywood appropriated the zombie from Haitian vaudou (bastardized in English as 'voodoo') and built its horror genre atop racial stereotypes and distortions of those traditions.
- Bedward traces the lineage back to the 1932 film 'White Zombie,' whose plot — a man turns a woman into a 'zombie slave' — explicitly couples the creature with slavery, an origin most fans overlook when watching modern zombie hits.
- In Haitian folklore, a zombi is a being deprived of its soul or free will — likened by Bedward to the condition of slaves before abolition — not a flesh-eater as Hollywood depicts, a distinction she argues the genre has erased.
- Bedward explains how George Romero's 1968 'Night of the Living Dead' — which never uses the word 'zombie' — became the prototypical zombie film, and how the civil rights movement shaped how Black audiences experienced it.
- The filmmaker shot black-and-white sequences on Hispaniola for the documentary, filming in the Dominican Republic rather than Haiti, and describes those scenes as rivaling Hollywood's cinematic beauty.
- The documentary was acquired by Kino Lorber, and Bedward discusses her intent to 'have fun' with the editing process.
- 'Doc Talk' is hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley ('12 Years a Slave,' 'Shirley') and Matt Carey, Deadline's senior documentary editor, and is a production of Deadline and Ridley's Nō Studios.
Why it matters: Bedward's documentary reframes a multibillion-dollar horror franchise — spanning films like 'World War Z' and 'Zombieland' and TV hits like 'The Walking Dead' — through its erased Haitian and racial origins, giving studios, filmmakers, and audiences a concrete lens to reassess a genre whose foundational imagery was borrowed from a marginalized culture and distorted for mass entertainment.
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