If Xavier Burgin's Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror is the equivalent of a survey course you might take freshman year at college, Maya Annik Bedward's Black Zombie is the kind of class you take junior year that makes you consider going to grad school for this stuff.
The film begins, as many of these documentaries about film do, with a montage of moments (spanning the 1920s to the 2020s) that attempt to convince you why you should care about this particular cultural history and its place in the pop culture landscape today.
Interspersed with these clips are several talking heads that give previews of the ideas the rest of the movie will delve into: Zombies raise "questions about autonomy and agency," zombies are "a mass culture, rapaciously consuming," and most interestingly and importantly, "It makes so much sense that the idea of a zombie would come from a tradition of people who were enslaved."
To close this section and introduce the film proper, a talking head says (in a transition that's so perfect Bedward may have fed them the line), "it's time for people to put the zombie in its historical context. If we know where it comes from, it brings up why we are portraying zombies as we are."
Rather than use this segue to bring the audience to the cultural historians who participate in the film, Bedward takes us directly to Haiti and interview subjects Yves-Grégory Francois, a young man who works in IT and is a Vodou practitioner, and Erol Josue, a multi-phenate artist, Executive Director of the National Bureau of Ethnology, and Vodou Priest. These men elucidate the everpresence of the past in Haiti, in and through the Vodou faith.
Josue explains that Vodou grew out of the traditions of the various African peoples who were brought to the island as slaves coming together and mixing their cultures and myths. He also notes that "Haitian Vodou is the very foundation of Haiti as a nation," a claim substantiated by the history of Haiti's revolution beginning at a Vodou ceremony.
Beyond the religion's place in the island's political history, Josue says "Vodou is a dance that keeps the history of Africa in our bodies." He says the Vodouisant believes their soul travels to a mythical Africa after death, "because they were torn from Africa against their will." Francois speaks of death as the only way for the enslaved people to return home, and so to turn someone into a zombie is to cut off that journey, to ensure that they never leave the hell of enslavement and the island.
From here, Black Zombie traces how this figure rich in specific cultural meaning was transformed into the insatiable throngs we know today, and does so with some flare. Archival video and audio help emphasize how recent the export of the idea of the zombie is. A section on "travel writer" William Seabrook, who first brought the concept of the zombie to white society through his book The Magic Island, published in 1929, is told in part with lightly animated panels from graphic novelist Joel Ollmann's biography of this capital C character. Several iris ins and outs are used throughout the section on Hollywood's relationship with the zombie, as it constantly shifts in and out of its initial Haitian context; albeit almost never with respect for the Haitian people or Vodou.
This section includes some of Black Zombie's best moments, as Bedward interviews botanist Wade Davis, writer of The Serpent and the Rainbow, a first hand account of his journey to Haiti as a white man investigating potential medical uses for any plants used by Vodouisants to create zombies. Davis says he became appalled at the racist portrayals of Haitian people he had seen when he actually learned about the Vodou faith, and that he was upset by Wes Craven's film adaptation of his book leaning into these same stereotypes. Yet others say that his book was essentially an Indiana Jones story to begin with.
In its final segments (perhaps the film's only misstep is the inclusion of unnecessary title cards that make the film seem longer and less cohesive than it is), Black Zombie brings all that it has laid out together in a series of powerful if not entirely revelatory statements about how representations of cultures and pop culture in general inform worldviews. Perhaps the most salient comes from Yale professor of Black Studies Kaiama L. Glover who, in speaking about how the depictions of zombie hordes reflect the way the United States treats migrants, argues "what you end up with in American culture is something far removed from the Haitian zombie but that serves as a weird bridge, and an inaccurate bridge, to the culture."
The film opens Friday, September 11, only in movie theaters, via Kino Lorber. Visit their official site for more information.