BLACK ZOMBIE – Review by Beth Accomando
Black Zombie is a fascinating and enlightening documentary that looks to the roots of zombie mythology in Haitian Vodou.
When zombies invaded our pop consciousness, they grabbed hold with ferocious tenacity. Vampire, mummies, and werewolves have long engaged the imagination throughliterature and film but their popularity seems to ebb and low. Zombies, on the other hand, keep rising from the dead to entrench themselves deeper and deeper in our collective consciousness.
The notion of zombies can be traced back to ancient times. In Ancient Greece, for example, archeologists have found bodies pinned down in graves with heavy rocks to prevent them from rising, reflecting fears about reanimated corpses or revenants.
The etymology of the word “zombie” can be traced back to Africa with linguists pointing to the Kimbundu word “nzumbi” meaning “ghost” or “spirit.” But the word took on greater weight and meaning on a French colonial island built on enslaved labor. The French colony of Saint-Domingue (1625-1804), now Haiti, was a highly profitable colony (from sugar and coffee) that accounted for a significant portion of France’s trade revenue. But the profits were built on a brutal system of slavery.
Enslaved Africans drew on their own spiritualism and blended it with elements from both the colonial island and Catholicism to create a religion that offered resilience in the face of harsh conditions. The horrors of slavery, with its complete denial of freedom for the enslaved, lay the foundation for the Vodou notion of zombies as beings that no longer possessed free will and were controlled by someone else. These zombies mirrored the inhumanity of slavery.
Most people are probably familiar with the zombies of George A. Romero. He is often credited as being the creator of the modern cinematic zombie with his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Romero’s shambling ghouls — with a craving for human flesh — tore at society’s infrastructure to reveal the racism beneath. He would continue to use them over the decades as a blank canvas for whatever social commentary he wanted to make on everything from consumerism to scientific research to classism.
But the new Canadian documentary Black Zombie, written and directed by Maya Annik Bedward, looks back to the Haitian roots of zombie mythology to reveal a rich history prior to the modern zombie.
What the film does well is to chronicle not just zombie mythology but also Haitian history, which is probably little known here in the U.S. Bedward lays out a history of colonization, slavery, rebellion and political punishment for a successful revolt.
One of the shocking things the film highlights is the Haitian independence debt, which stemmed from an 1825 agreement between Haiti and France in which France demanded that Haiti pay for the loss of property (France considered Haitian slaves among that property) France suffered during the Haitian Revolution. In return for this payment (which because of loans and interest was not to be officially paid off until 1947!), Haiti would receive diplomatic recognition. I have to confess that while I knew of the Haitian Revolution, I had never heard about the Haitian independence debt. That revelation was shocking and infuriating.
Black Zombie provides a vital history that gives context to current politics and also a greater understanding of a bigger picture about slavery, colonization and who gets to write history. For all that, the film is an amazing work and a welcome exposure to a different perspective.
But where the film failed for me was in the actual discussion of zombies on film. As someone who loves and appreciates what the zombie film has contributed to both cinema and social commentary, I feel Bedward does not give them their full due. She uses a lot of clips from films combined with new black and white footage she creates about zombies, but for the most part she does not identify where the clips are from. There is one brief sequence where she clearly identifies a handful of film clips but I wish she had been clear in identifying all of them. A simple lower third is all that’s needed and sometimes you just want to check out a film that intrigues you based on an image or scene.
Early Hollywood films such as White Zombie (1932) with Bela Lugosi and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) directed by Jacques Tourneur are guilty of unfortunate stereotypes and tropes, but the Tourneur film does contain some intriguing references to Vodou culture that merit examination and imply an indictment of colonial exploitation.
Bedward seems bent on dismissing the western horror genre as a whole for appropriating Haitian zombie lore and using it to distort Black history. There is definite merit to her argument but I also feel she misses some interesting discussion about zombie films as evolving political activism. What makes zombies appealing as a blank canvas for social commentary is also what makes them terrifying — they look like us but they’re not us. That places them in a unique position to reflect real issues that we may not want to confront.
Zombies also get to a pair of very core fears. First, the terror of being in a physical condition where you are no longer you, you are in your body but have lost your identity, your very humanity, because you can no longer control your body or your mind. That is very much rooted in the Vodou zombie and while that may be ignoring how it reflects Black history, it has become a powerful metaphor for social commentary in other ways.
Zombie films at their core are about what makes us human. Which leads to the second fear: fear of the other and discovering that the other could be us, could be a loved one that still looks like the person you know but now may be a threat or be someone you have to kill.
Recently, there’s been a focus on the self-aware zombie, the zombie that’s beginning to have consciousness about what he’s become. Bub in Day of the Dead (1985) was the first self-aware zombie and the humanity we saw in him made us question the humanity of the scientist using him for experiments and treating him no better than a lab rat.
More recent zombie films shake up the formula by trying to show the world from the zombie’s perspective and to try to elicit sympathy for the “monster.” This was true of Samson in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. In today’s politic climate this holds significant social meaning as the media and politicians try to use fear of the other as a tool. Zombies can suggest that the thing we are told to fear, the thing we may be trying to protect ourselves from may be more like us than we want to admit. Zombies are not the other, they are us on some level.
Black Zombie interviews Tananarive Due but gives her too little time to dissect the zombie film from the perspective of a Black film historian. Due is brilliant and she was a contributor to the Horror Noire series that I highly recommend if you want more film history with clear identification of films and savvy analysis from filmmakers and academics.
Despite some shortcomings on the horror film side, Black Zombie is a documentary that is still well worth checking out. It provides a lens on Haitian history and culture that we rarely see and that is enlightening.
