The Republic of Haiti was born of one of history’s only successful slave rebellions, and yet somehow I sat through many interminable, boring history classes without learning this real-life Star Wars shit. When I first heard the story, I felt betrayed. Where was the big-budget spectacular retelling?
Instead, Haiti became the source of a different Hollywood box office engine: the zombie flick.
Black Zombie, a documentary by Jamaican French Canadian director Maya Annik Bedford, lays out how the zombie went from existing as a local nightmare at the edge of Haiti’s vodou religion to a globalized big-ticket brains eater genre.
The saga starts in 1923, when American journalist William Seabrook traveled to the Caribbean island country, hoping to write about exotic vodou rituals. There he’s told that local sorcerers have been reanimating fresh corpses, forcing them to work, and denying them the the right to decay in peace.
Seabrook was thrilled, writing: “Werewolves, vampires, and demons were certainly no novelty.”But these “zombies” definitely were. He asked to see some and was taken to a remote cotton field where four people were tilling the dirt, looking like they were on the verge of collapse.
According to Seabrock, he introduced himself with a “Bonjour!” and reached out to shake one man’s hand only to receive a blank, vacant-eyed stare in return.
In his book, The Magic Island, Seabrook admits the scene doesn’t prove he was talking to a dead man. At the time, Haiti was under US military occupation at the behest of the bank now known as CitiGroup, and it was standard for the military and/or anyone else with guns to round residents up for forced labor, shooting anyone who attempted to run. Work crews composed of people who looked like they were on the verge of death were not uncommon.
The 1932 film adaptation of The Magic Island takes its own spin on Seabrook’s experience. Titled The White Zombie, it asks the bold question: “Could you make a conventionally attractive white lady into a zombie? If so, would she date you?” The genre’s flesh eating trope won’t enter the picture until Night of the Living Dead (1968), a super low-budget horror film that came to be after screenwriters George Romero and John Russo realized they couldn’t afford to build a flying saucer for a sci-fi film.
There’s a lot happening in Black Zombie. Bedford tries to squeeze at least three different storylines into the film. In addition to the zombie’s journey through Hollywood, there’s also a history of Haiti’s brutal debt to France, a series of earnest interviews with contemporary vodou practitioners, the right-wing evangelical theory that Haitians made a deal with the devil to liberate themselves from the French, and a dreamy, black and white silent short that re-works the zombie film as a Haitian narrative.
If it sounds like Black Zombie lags a bit, it does. But it’s also one of the most incisive and thought-provoking documentaries I’ve seen this year. If only there were more films this beautiful about monsters.
Black Zombie screens at Tomorrow Theater, 3530 SE Division, Thurs Oct 1, 7 pm, FREE, tickets here, SOLD OUT, all ages ready to hear about forced labor.
