The Roots of Black Zombie

"There's been a relationship between Black traditions and stories and film since the beginning of film," says Maya Annik Bedward when discussing her new documentary Black Zombie. "Hollywood has been pulling from these stories and misinterpreting them."

Building a bridge of tales and legends using the planks of cultural appropriation, the film industry has a long history of distorting the perception of Black culture for profit. A decade in the making, Black Zombie charts the evolution of the zombie narrative from its roots in Haiti to becoming an unstoppable Hollywood juggernaut.

Commonly associated with works such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Walking Dead, there is no denying that zombies have had a firm grip on pop culture for decades. Before making the film, Bedward felt disconnected from them. "Before I learned about Haitian Vodou, zombie films never spoke to me. They never felt like there was a rationale for why they existed."

A Haitian Vodou metaphor for enslaved individuals whom not even death could save from the plantation fields, the notion of the zombie perfectly encapsulated the horrors of slavery. Intrigued by how such an important origin had been stripped away, Bedward's film offers an in-depth examination of the ways anti-Blackness has continually been used to keep the resilient people of Haiti down.

Tracing the origins of Haitian Vodou to the traditions of enslaved West and Central Africans in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1790, Black Zombie paints a devastating portrait of the various ways colonialism actively worked to stifle and distort a religion that gave many an empowering light in dark times.

"I really want people to come away from this film and be curious to learn more about Haiti in a very different way than Haiti's often represented in the media," she says.

Black Zombie had its world premiere at SXSW 2026.

This article originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of POV.