More than reclaiming the zombie motif from the knee-jerk response that Night of the Living Dead inhibited, Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie is a reclamation of Vodou from the colonial fear-mongering that used it to demonize Black people the world over. Because it’s 2026 and Haitians are still cautious to admit their connection to the religion. There’s still an outsider belief that Haiti’s recent hardships are a result of its ancestors making a pact with the Devil.
It’s why I love that Bedward included Erol Josué’s candid response when asking about his feelings towards the film. He explains that he’s optimistic her heart is in the right place and his words will hold contextual value within the reality of Vodou rather than be warped to confirm the bias of Hollywood’s bastardization, but he’s been burned before. He’s seen other filmmakers come and go, only to have the finished work become yet another example of cultural voyeurism.
Well, I hope he breathed a sigh of relief after watching this one—it’s as far from William Seabrook’s The Magic Island and Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow as you can get. Bedward very consciously only uses poor portrayals when scholars like Dominique Taffin, John Cussans, and Kaiama L. Glover poke holes in the depictions. She lets Josué, Yves-Grégory Francois, and Mambo Labelle Déese Botanica’s words and actions display Vodou’s beauty.
The film takes us through the history of Haiti so that we can better understand the origins of the word “zombie,” how it was weaponized, and the ways in which it’s evolved to both detach from its genesis and further perpetuate the stereotype. We learn about the African slaves working the sugar cane fields and praying for death so their spirits could return to Guinea, and how the idea of being a zombie was a prison of the soul from ever finding that release.
To gain that context is to see countless movies in a new light. How Night of the Living Dead using a Black lead could traumatize more than empower. How World War Z and other latter-day examples repurpose the “horde” into a metaphor for “othering” as a means to dehumanize (and thus murder) without remorse. Yet the only reason John Russo and Romero made their zombies into flesh-eaters was because Old Hollywood’s evil Black slaves weren’t scary enough.
You get a little bit of gore talk from Tom Savini, some Americanized Vodou talk from Slash, and the indefatigable allure of zombies as a pop-culture icon through Zombie Walk organizer Thea Munster, but Black Zombie is never better than when it’s delving deeper into the psychology, spirituality, and heritage beneath those aesthetic touchstones. Horror as an escapist outlet from state violence. Or a “zombie awakening” leading to actual revolutionary independence.
There are real-world implications beyond cinematic monsters. Just look how you can draw a line from the colonialist machine in Saint-Domingue to the Trump Administration targeting Haitian immigrants—a bid to remove them from the United States—by leaning into the same racist talking points from 100 years ago, despite so many of them propping up the American elder-care system on their backs. It’s all spelled out in figurative neon lights.
That’s not to belittle other through lines, including Zandashé Brown making her horror films from a Black lens that takes all of that into consideration. These two things go hand-in-hand—understanding by way of lifting the veil, thanks to oral traditions surviving as pushback against the sensationalism, is only half the battle. You still need Brown and Bedward to make use of that truth and disseminate it through their art to the masses who still need to learn.
Black Zombie is thus as much an educational resource to reveal Hollywood’s indoctrination in service of colonial infrastructure as it is an answer utilizing that knowledge to combat it in real time without the need for subterfuge (although the story of Haitians wrapping Vodou in Christianity is fascinating). Bedward plays with fictionalized reenactment to start building a new canon to replace the 1930s and ’40s clips exemplifying Western spin. She’s setting souls free.
Black Zombie screened at the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival and opens in select theaters on September 11.
The post Fantasia Review: Black Zombie Explores the Psychology, Spirituality, and Heritage of a Horror Touchstone first appeared on The Film Stage.
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