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In Hollywood’s original horror heyday of the 1930s and ’40s, it would have been hard to imagine another figure challenging the classic terror quartet of Dracula, Frankenstein monster, werewolf and mummy — let alone
that the lowly zombie would ever become serious competition. Yet while those aforementioned creatures still get rehabilitated on a regular basis, they’re now greatly surpassed in popular visibility by a cannibal undead that didn’t even exist in the genre until more recent decades.
Maya Annik Bedward’s Canadian documentary “Black Zombie” explores that surprise evolution. But hers isn’t a genre fan’s focus so much as a cultural anthropologist’s eye, honing in on how the screen zombie has exploited and distorted the Haitian religious beliefs that provided its initial inspiration. Kino Lorber is opening the Canadian documentary in the U.S. on Sept. 11th; Raven Banner will release it on home turf the same date.
Today zombie entertainment is so ubiquitous, it encompasses enormously expensive blockbusters (“World War Z”), big-screen franchises (like the “28 Days” films), an entire “Walking Dead” multimedia empire, comedies (“Shaun of the Dead” being the most famous) and myriad other expressions. Often involving animated corpses who are “fast-moving” — making their hunger for living flesh an even greater peril — these images break from the standard late-20th century convention of slow, shuffling if still bloodthirsty dullards, a template established by George A. Romero’s 1968 sleeper smash “Night of the Living Dead.”
At neither speed, however, do they have much to do with the zombie’s prior, much-less-frequent pulp appearances. Those had roots in 1929’s bestselling “The Magic Island,” one of several questionable works of journalism by the writer, adventure and occult sensation-seeker William Seabrook. (His most credible tome was probably the subsequent “Asylum,” which detailed his institutional recovery from alcoholism.) He claimed to have seen laborers in the cane fields of Haiti who were seemingly in a trance, incapable of speaking.
The notion of zombies went back to that Caribbean nation’s days as a European colony, when huge numbers of largely African slaves were brutally disciplined and frequently worked to death by a white-settler minority. It was rumored that some got drugged or otherwise rendered “soul lost,” so they would toil without rest or protest. Thus within Haitian culture, zombies were victims, robbed of independent will by cruel masters.
Seabrook’s primary focus was on Vodou aka voodoo rituals, which had long constituted an underground religious practice amongst populations outwardly accepting of Catholicism. But his mention of “zondis,” the dead supposedly revived via magic for cane harvesting, ignited the popular imagination. It soon got fictionalized as the post-“Dracula” Bela Lugosi vehicle “White Zombie” (1932), then in other films, notably the Val Lewton-produced “I Walked With a Zombie” a decade later. Their suspense arose not from anything that happened to or at the hands of zombie-fied “natives,” but the terror that such hypnosis might be used on Caucasian protagonists — especially pretty young ingenues.
Bedward elicits commentary from latter-day scholars, historians, and Vodou priests. They dissect how these representations reinforced superstitious racial stereotypes in a vintage “exotica” mode, one reprised at least as recently as Wes Craven’s 1988 “The Serpent and the Rainbow.” Those movies are seen as part of an ongoing disempowering of the Haitian peoples, who have been continually hobbled by occupiers, imposed foreign debts and political instability. The myth of witless, “savage” zombies only helped perpetuate the idea that Haitians cannot be trusted to control their own destiny.
“Black Zombie” illustrates that point with an engaging mix of clips, interviews, old newsreel footage, brief animations and B&W staged sequences with Anderson Mojica as an 18th-century slave who’s first subsumed by, then overcomes his “zombie” state of passive toil. (It is suggested that depriving laborers of salt intake might have had such stupefying effects.)
Horror fans may be disappointed that the later waves of zombie cinema get rather fleeting address here, though we do hear from legendary gore FX maestro Tom Savini and the late Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” co-writer John Russo. (The latter says their ultra-low-budget breakout settled for its hungry-ghoul gist only because they couldn’t afford the trappings of a science-fiction tale.) The whole cannibalism conceit has scant connection to Vodou lore, so it’s of little relevance to the director’s main thesis here. However, some of her experts do opine that the manic, devouring hordes of modern depiction discreetly amplify new paranoias: not just the “fear of Blacks” implicit in earlier zombie thrillers, but wealthy nations’ current panic over “invading” Third World immigrants, climate-change refugees, and so forth. Now, zombies simply “represent otherness,” as one observer puts it.
The authorities Bedward solicits intel from often speak reluctantly, having been burned before: They’re all too familiar with filmmakers feigning sincere interest, only to deliver yet another bloody screen cartoon of Haitian history and beliefs. While “Black Zombie” isn’t quite the genre “greatest hits” parade many viewers may be hoping for, it does provide a thought-provoking perspective — one that might add some depth to your next experience of undead cinema, however purely escapist.
