While zombies are a staple monster in horror, right up there with Dracula and Frankenstein, their history in film is fraught, drawn from a legacy of slavery and misfortune. But now, viewers can explore that history in Black Zombie, a new documentary that just released its first trailer.
Written and directed by Maya Annik Bedward, Black Zombie features appearances from Yves-Grégory Francois, Tananarive Due, Mambo Labelle Déesse, Slash, Tom Savini, and Zandashé Brown. The film’s synopsis is as follows:
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. 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.
“When I first encountered the Haitian origin story of the zombie, I was stunned,” says Bedward. “I had no idea that the mindless, flesh-eating monster of popular culture carried such profound cultural meaning. In Haitian Vodou cosmology, the zombie is not a villain but a victim, a person condemned to eternal enslavement, stripped of will and agency. It is a metaphor born from the brutality of slavery, and a fate worse than death. Suddenly, the zombie was no longer arbitrary for me. It embodied the historical and ongoing rupture of Black freedom, culture, and identity. It reflected the very disconnection I had long felt from my own heritage. From that moment, I knew I had to tell this story.”
Black Zombie is produced by Bedward, Hannah Donegan, Kate Fraser, Jennifer Holness, Michael Paszt, Andrew Thomas Hunt, James Fler, and Slash. The documentary is one of several exploring the legacy of certain horror films this year, a list that also includes Boorman and the Devil, about the making of the infamous Exorcist II: The Heretic.
Black Zombie opens in New York and Los Angeles on September 11, with a further expansion yet to be announced.
