A selection at SXSW Film Festival 2026, Hot Docs 2026, Fantasia International Film Festival, 2026 Black Star Film Festival 2026, and more, Maya Annik Bedward’s documentary Black Zombie will now get a theatrical release starting next month. Ahead of an opening on September 11 in NYC & LA, Kino Lorber has released the first trailer.
Here’s the snyopis: “BLACK ZOMBIE digs beneath the blood-soaked spectacle of modern horror to uncover the zombie’s buried and unsettling origins. Long before it became associated with flesh-eating ghouls, the zombie was a living metaphor for slavery: not a monster, but the ultimate victim of colonial power. A symbol of stolen agency was recast as an object of fear, while Black spiritual traditions were distorted, sensationalized, and erased. Director Maya Annik Bedward traces the evolution of the zombie from colonial Haiti to contemporary Hollywood, reconsidering iconic films like WHITE ZOMBIE, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW alongside archival footage, vérité scenes, and interviews with cultural historians, artists, and genre legends including Yves-Grégory Francois, Mambo Labelle Déesse, Slash, Tom Savini, and Zandashé Brown. Part cultural reckoning, part horror remix, BLACK ZOMBIE exposes how a figure born from enslavement, spiritual belief, and resistance was transformed into one of pop culture’s most profitable monsters.”
Jared Mobarak said in his review, “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.”
See the trailer below.
The post Black Zombie Trailer Digs Up the Unsettling Origins of a Horror Staple first appeared on The Film Stage.
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