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Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23-May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.
by Angelo Muredda Late in Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie, a cross-cultural survey of the zombie in Haitian folklore and horror cinema, a Vodou priest who’s served as an authenticity expert throughout the film derisively summarizes Western imaginations of West African culture as a history of voyeurism. “I hope this isn’t that,” he says of Bedward’s documentary, whose title explicitly subverts Victor Halperin’s 1932 pre-code horror film White Zombie, a foundational colonial narrative of white innocence besieged by the ostensibly monstrous threat of Blackness, and whose intellectual project seeks to dismantle that film’s corrosive source text, William Seabrook’s Haitian travelogue The Magic Island, which exported the zombie and Vodou to the West as figures of exotic superstition. A rigorous if somewhat segmented essay on the colonial violence inherent in the horror genre’s extraction of West African beliefs, Bedward’s work easily clears this admittedly modest bar. Though it will read a bit introductory for historians of the Haitian resistance movement, French colonialism, and genre cinema, it’s nevertheless a formally engaging and provocative piece that effectively re-situates the zombie in the context from which it’s been extracted: the belief among enslaved Haitian plantation workers that death might return their spirits to their ancestral home in Ghana, while further violence at the hands of colonial administrators and their proxies might render them zombies, undead and hopelessly rooted on the colony for the rest of their days.
There is an academic playfulness and rigour to Bedward’s structure, which thrives on juxtaposition. She casts her aesthetic and intellectual net rather widely, interspersing clips from films as disparate as I Walked with a Zombie and World War Z, as well as interviews with usual suspects like Tom Savini and Night of the Living Dead screenwriter John Russo, plus emerging Black genre filmmakers such as Zandashé Brown and horror novelist Tananarive Due. Bedward balances these genre authorities with several Vodou practitioners and scholars, such as Yves-Grégory Francois, who casually dismantles the pseudo-anthropological voodoo hooey of both Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow and the Roger Moore Bond outing Live and Let Die, in which Baron Samedi, ferryman of the dead, becomes a cartoon villain. Apart from Francois’s acerbic critiques and Brown’s observations about how Black artists like herself have fruitfully replanted the zombie in the Black southern gothic tradition, the film gets the most mileage out of Black Studies professor Kaiama L Glover, who anchors us in the zombie’s rich historical context in colonialism, enslavement, and the white gaze of Western anthropologists and travel writers.
As impressive as this intricate latticework of writers, filmmakers, priests, and intellectuals may be, at times Bedward struggles to knit together the stubbornly disparate threads of genre history and anti-colonial critique. Black Zombie’s aesthetics also lapse occasionally into the familiar tropes of the anthropological deep-dive, with Bedward cutting predictably from establishing shots of library stacks to close-ups of scholars gingerly tracing the spines of books on West Africa. Yet she meets the brief of offering something more interesting than another work of Western cultural tourism, achieving this not only through her subjects’ often stirring commentary but also with an elegant, black-and-white, fictionalized retelling of the Haitian zombie mythos–featuring a group of plantation workers looking forlornly beyond the shore to the home their spirits yearn to rejoin–that she fans out in segments throughout and resolves in a playful metafictional portrait of herself and her mostly-Black crew putting this film-within-the-film together. In pulling back to reveal the camera, boom mic, and lights, along with herself in the director’s chair behind them, she explicitly joins this cacophonous discourse on the zombie on her own authentic terms.
