Black Zombie (2026) SXSW Film Festival Review

Directed by: Maya Annik Bedward

Written by: Maya Annik Bedward

Starring: Mambo Labelle Déese Botanica, Zandashé Brown, Tananarive Due

Documentary Film Review by: Joyce Cowan

★★★★★

Black Zombie is a deeply illuminating work about the origin of the zombie and how the concept of a zombie has developed, in popular culture and cinema, since its discovery by Western society in 1927.

Directed by Maya Annik Bedward, this documentary includes accounts that are fascinatingly varied, from film historians, to writers, to artists and spiritual seekers. The audience is taken through the origins of the zombie as it developed in Haiti. With the idea of a zombie rooted in the suffering of slavery that Africans transported to Haiti and Saint Domingue suffered at the hands of the French Empire, and the deep misinterpretation of this, and Haitian Voudou culture, by Westerners, especially Americans, we get told the fascinating story of this, from a cultural, sociological and historical perspective.

Black Zombie is a truly interdisciplinary piece. From a cultural standpoint, the audience learns that while in American culture the zombie represents simply the scary idea of power beyond the grave, or the ‘undead’, in Haitian culture it has always represented the concept of ‘living under someone else’s thumb’, without agency or choice- much like a slave. It is akin to being stripped of your soul. Similarly, we learn that the idea of a zombie should not be fully conflated with Voudu religion, which is ‘a dance that keeps the history of Africa in our bodies’, as the Director of the National Bureau of Ethnology of Haiti explains.

The documentary also offers a cinematic history of zombies, from the (deeply racist) White Zombie, based on the book written by the adventurer who introduced the West to the idea after spending time in Haiti, William Searbrook, called The Magic Island published in 1927, through the 1968 film Dawn of the Dead, which presented a very different type of zombie: no longer black, and whose soul purpose is to eat the flesh of those still alive- basically, our current idea of a zombie.

The experts also attempt to share with the viewer their thoughts on why zombies and zombie stories are still so strong in popular culture, with the interesting conclusion that they are a representation of the ‘otherness’ and how our worst instincts respond to this. In this respect, the history of the zombie can be harnessed to reclaim what has been erased from black history, and the horror genre has been used by young filmmakers such as Zandashe Brown to attempt this, because, in her words, ‘stories correct “history", they give us back what was taken’. In a similar vein, Tananarive Duo, a film historian, argues that the horror genre in general is used by many to process fears and traumas, which include social traumas, not least the legacy of slavery that gave rise to the original concept of zombie.

With brilliant shots of various relevant locations and a hypnotic original score by David Arcus, Black Zombie is an unmissable documentary.