BLACK ZOMBIE (SXSW 2026) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Zombies have become so entrenched in popular culture that it’s impossible to swing a limb without hitting one in film, a television series, or video games. But these snarling, feral, flesh-eating creatures actually have their roots in the spiritual realm—and rebellion.

That’s one of the many thought-provoking revelations of Black Zombie, a fascinating and enlightening documentary that premiered at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival. Through interviews with cultural and film historians, vodou practitioners, and others, director Maya Annik Bedward unpacks the real-life context and misconceptions behind this long-running threat in the horror canon.

Most modern zombie interpretations, at least in Western culture, trace back to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968, a landmark film framing these mindless creatures as cultural commentary between the gore. Black Zombie touches on that film’s subtext of White fears around the Civil Rights Movement that Romero admitted weren’t subtle, even as he said he cast Duane Jones, a Black actor, as the protagonist solely because he had the best performance. (Lawmen killing Jones during the film’s climax is a shattering twist that’s resonated with Black audiences for decades, one historian notes here.)

However, the concept of the zombie as a reanimated corpse subject to another’s control dates back much farther—and is much more tragic.

French colonizers reaped the benefits of Haiti as a rich source of sugarcane in 1790s, thanks to hundreds of thousands of slaves captured from Africa. Under such brutal conditions, many wished for death, believing that was the only way they could return home, something Bedward depicts through brief reenactments of a worker in the fields and at the shore, as well as black-and-white archive footage.

Imagine someone denying them even this, through claiming their consciousness and their soul, one interviewee says.

Bedward (Farm Crime) alternates the riveting interviews, which include filmmaker Zandashé Brown (Horror Noire) and Night of the Living Dead co-writer John Russo, with clips from Western films with painfully racist portrayals of Haitian culture, the earliest here being 1932’s White Zombie. Adapted from the 1929 travelogue The Magic Island by William Seabrook—laughably described as “one of those White guys who wants to be part of the thing that is not part of his culture”—the film introduced some of the zombie tropes (spells, chanting, kidnapped White women for sacrifices) that have plagued Haiti and vodou ever since. Seabrook apparently thought zombies were just superstitions until a local man took him to the cane fields, where stoic workers met him with silence and blank stares. Honestly, what did he expect them to do? Sit down to tea?

Zombies are adjacent to vodou, a religion that believes in the possession by divine spirits, interviewees explain. But Hollywood portrayals and tourist tchotchkes haven’t shaken the other connotations. Bedward interviews ethnobotanist Wade Davis, author of The Serpent and the Rainbow, who says he’s appalled how the beauty of this faith has been portrayed, even in director Wes Craven’s 1988 horror film loosely based on his book. (Davis never badmouthed the film at the time, he says, because “it bought me a house.”)

Black Zombie doesn’t delve into the whole history of vodou over its one hour and 30 minutes, but what it does show through the dancing, music, and ritual artwork in long takes and medium and wide shots conveys respect, warmth, and joy. In one scene, a vodou priest in white navigates a spiral at the ruins of a sugarcane mill barefoot, slowly dancing and singing in Creole, as if commemorating those lost and celebrating liberation.

Vodou helped unite African slaves and trigger the Haitian Revolution, which ended in 1804. Demonizing it is by design, one historian says, playing into White fears of Black power and payback.

Odds are, none of the people shuffling and snarling through Halloween “zombie walks” knows this history, making Black Zombie an eye-opening reclamation. While the zombies of The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, and the 28 Years Later saga are far removed from Haitian culture, they’re also “a weird bridge” to it, as one professor says: a reminder of the extraordinary measures we take to turn people into villains and monsters.