‘An embodiment of white fears’: how zombies went from Haitian spiritual tradition to Hollywood monsters

1 day ago 11

American film has a canon of racist disinformation that famously includes The Birth of a Nation, King Kong (1933) and Gone With the Wind.

A new documentary makes a compelling argument that zombies, as presented, commodified and popularized by Hollywood, are part of the same tradition. Black Zombie serves as work of restoration and correction, placing its faith in the quiet, persistent power of the truth as it stares down a tsunami of colonial erasure, denial, white-washing, violence and theft.

Its opening revelation – that zombies are a Haitian idea, invented to capture the metaphysical anguish of being torn from one’s home and subjected to torture, rape and forced labor – is startling in its own right. But then director Maya Annik Bedward widens the aperture of understanding, engaging cultural experts in horror, such as Tananarive Due, an author and professor, Tom Savini, Night of the Living Dead special effects guru, Zandashé Brown, southern gothic film-maker, and Erol Josué, Haitian artist, vodou priest and choreographer, as she unwinds centuries of motivated misunderstanding to address broader questions: how did this happen? And why is this knowledge obscured?

In her documentary feature debut, which premiered earlier this year at SXSW, Annik Bedward, a Jamaican-French Canadian curious about the misconceptions behind vodou, journeys to Haiti to find out. In speaking with local experts and historians to unwrap the bandages of a misinformation mummy, she reveals a larger tragedy: the way the obscured history and provenance of the zombie has mirrored the fate of the people who invented it. When a person becomes a zombie, they are unable to return home, even in death. Part of Haitian lore is that a trapped spirit can free itself with a taste of salt, which white colonizers forbade Haitians from eating.

Black Zombie reveals how an enterprising American journalist, William Seabrook, set off a century of cultural extraction, obfuscation and projection with his book The Magic Island, first published in 1929. The Magic Island marks the first use of the word “zombie” in the printed English language. Seabrook becomes the zombie’s first sensationalist, patronizing colonial observer, embedding himself with Haitians. His exotic dispatches, set off with racist caricatures by illustrator Alexander King, gets optioned, sending the Haitian zombie tumbling into the Hollywood machine, extruded and presented as White Zombie in 1932.

The Haitian zombie is no longer a sorrowful artifact of dispossession, but a disfigured tool that collapses the zombie and vodou – two adjacent but separate ideas – into an indistinct stew. Vodou is a spiritual practice, a philosophy, a way of transmitting knowledge through generations and across oceans, expressing an embodied relationship with spirits through dance. It’s a metaphysical conversation. But onscreen, both vodou and the zombie become embodiments of white fears of Black savagery and desire for revenge. The zombie becomes a monster that must be put down, by any means necessary. The same cycle happens again in 1988, first with the publication of The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis, and its subsequent sensationalist adaptation by director Wes Craven.

To correct this record, Annik Bedward engages Haitians as reliable narrators of their own experiences, traditions and spiritual practices. She travels to New Orleans to capture how vodou has been turned into meaningless kitsch meant to separate tourists from their money. Together with documentaries such as Exterminate All the Brutes and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Black Zombie offers an indictment of not just colonialism and slavery, but of the damage that former colonial powers continue to inflict in the postcolonial era.

“The more you can render people monstrous or claim that it’s their behavior that calls for punishment, essentially, then, the less you have to feel guilty about your practices, as an individual, as a community, as a state,” Kaiama L Glover, a Yale professor, explains in a scene in Black Zombie. “The zombie is a useful tool for that. It really cannot be underestimated the way culture can do the work of statecraft.”

There is overt physical violence, the kind which comes from the barrel of a gun, the blade of a machete, or the crack of a lash. But the story of how the Haitian zombie becomes transmuted into a simplistic, undead money-making monster for Hollywood is a story of a more insidious violence that continues into 2026. If weaponry and ammunition constitute hard power, then the ability to shape culture, truth and history, or soft power, can be just as destructive, if not more so. Physical structures can be rebuilt. But memory, even when well-preserved, can be adulterated, drowned out and crumbled with a few well-placed lies.

Take for instance, the lie Donald Trump uttered in 2024 during a debate with former vice-president Kamala Harris. He falsely claimed that Haitian migrants were eating pets belonging to residents of Springfield, Ohio. He campaigned on promises of mass deportation and he has delivered. This year, Brooklyn’s annual West Indian Day parade doubled as a form of defiant protest for Haitian participants. They carried placards condemning ICE and calling for the reinstatement of temporary protected status after the supreme court upheld the administration’s right to revoke it, rendering some 350,000 Haitians vulnerable to detention and deportation. The Trump administration has continued to ground its foreign and immigration policy in false narratives, with officials repeatedly insisting that it is safe for Haitian nationals to return to Haiti, even as armed gangs continue to terrorize and kill residents.

Having successfully destabilized the Haitian republic and shaken down reparations to French slavers in the form of crippling debt, former colonial powers continue to disfigure the truth. The contemporary Hollywood zombie is merely the most visible manifestation of the erasure of Haitian heritage and story. Both Fifa and the IOC forced the country to change its uniform designs for depicting the country’s founding revolutionary, Toussaint L’ouverture. It took Annik Bedward 10 years to make Black Zombie. When she finally received production funding, it was shortly after the 2021 assassination of president Jovenel Moïse. The ensuing violence and instability forced Annik Bedward, her Haitian crew and cast of historical re-enactors to finish shooting in the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighbor on the island of Hispaniola. “Pretty much everyone has left the country who could, who’s involved in the project,” Annik Bedward says. “And it’s really sad because they love their country and it’s like the effects of what happened to Haiti is still being felt in a huge way today.”

And so, with the help of Annik Bedward’s remarkable film, the Haitian zombie marches on, leaving a trail of salt in its wake, still attempting to steer the world to the truth, to the Middle Passage graveyard that is the Atlantic, to the shores of Africa. To home.