The zombie – slow moving, with sallow complexion, hollow eyes, rotting teeth and a hunger for human flesh – has been lumbering through Hollywood movies for decades now. In fact, the first representation of the undead creatures came in the film White Zombie, released all the way back in 1932. That movie’s sensationalized logline: “A young man turns to a witch doctor to lure the woman he loves away from her fiancé, but instead turns her into a zombie slave.”
The coupling of the terms “zombie” and “slave” points to the racial dimension of the zombie in film history and popular culture, origins few fans think about when they watch World War Z, for example, or going further back, I Walked with a Zombie (1943) or the comedies Zombieland (2009) and Shaun of the Dead (2004), or the TV series The Walking Dead and its spinoffs.
In her new documentary Black Zombie, director Maya Annik Bedward examines Hollywood’s obsession with zombies, and how the horrifying ghouls were appropriated from Haitian culture and the religious practices of vaudou (bastardized in English as “voodoo”). The filmmaker argues Hollywood zombie movies are shot through with racial stereotypes and distortions of vaudou traditions (a zombi in Haitian folklore isn’t a flesh eater but a being deprived of its soul or free will – in that sense, very much the condition of slaves before abolition).
Bedward joins the latest edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to unpack her findings. She explains how 1968’s Night of the Living Dead became a prototypical “zombie” movie even though the term isn’t used in the film, and she explores how the civil rights movement informed how Black audiences experienced that George Romero classic.
In her documentary, Bedward incorporates scenes she shot in black and white on the island of Hispaniola, which rival anything done by Hollywood in terms of their cinematic beauty. The filmmaker tells us why she had to film those sequences in the Dominican Republic instead of Haiti and why it was important for her to “have fun” with the editing of her documentary.
RELATED: Kino Lorber Acquires Maya Annik Bedward’s Doc ‘Black Zombie’
That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
