Black Zombie isn’t your standard genre documentary. While horror stalwarts like Tom Savini and Tananarive Due appear as talking heads, the documentary instead takes a historical and social approach as it traces the cinematic zombie back to its Haitian origins and Black spiritual traditions.
That has everything to do with the documentary’s writer-director, Maya Annik Bedward, who didn’t set out to uncover the zombie’s roots as a horror fan, but became one over the lengthy process in making her directorial debut.
“I had no relationship to horror or zombies whatsoever,” Bedward tells Bloody Disgusting ahead of the film’s release on September 11. “In fact, I had watched very little horror, and it was [Black Zombie] that really introduced me to the horror world. I even met my partner through this film, who’s a horror guy. This has opened up this whole genre to me, which has been probably the biggest surprise in making the film, to be honest.”
It has been quite a journey, too, giving Bedward ample time to fall in love with horror.
“I’ve been working on the film for way over 10 years. We got the green light for production in 2020, and our first day of principal photography was in March 2020, in LA.”
That threw a lot of wrenches into production, of course. The doc opens with a rare glimpse of a gloomy Los Angeles. As Bedward explains, “We had to cancel 90% of the shoot, but it was kind of cool, because we were in LA, and everything was closed, and everyone was off the street, and we just had one more day before we could get our flight out. Everything felt apocalyptic, so it was amazing to capture this rainy, dark Hollywood, very different than how people usually see LA on film, and very relevant for the way we were gonna discuss Hollywood in the film.”
The filmmaker adds, “But yeah, it’s been a long time. I started working with Yves-Gregory François, one of the Haitian Vodou practitioners in the film, quite a long time ago. We started discussing the film and talking about what it would be. I was in Haiti, I think, in 2018 or 2019, doing research there, and a lot of the research footage that we shot in Haiti is from then. We shot over several years. I was shooting when I was just doing research, and then when I got funding to go into production, the pandemic hit, and I had to pause.”
Bedward quickly pivoted around the pandemic-induced delays: “Then I started traveling around once we could to collect more interviews and connect with more Vodou practitioners.”
Black Zombie spans the globe, assembling quite a lot of material over the entire process. That made Bedward’s first film a behemoth to corral into a condensed 90-minute feature. “When we got to the editing, I was still shooting, and then the editing was a whole process, because there’s so much archival and so many film clips, where we really got into the meat of how we’re going to connect everything together.”
A lot of consideration was put into every step, including who would lend their expertise to her film. She explains, “I really needed to be thoughtful in who I found. And usually when it came to more of the academics, it was making sure they could really talk to at least two major parts of the film.
“So it was never just an academic in horror history, or just an academic in Afro-Caribbean history. I needed people who could specialize in more, or have personal experience in at least two aspects of the film, so that they could bridge the bigger story I was trying to tell. Then, obviously, the Vodou practitioners — their voices were the most important. Those were the people I worked with. I approached the Mambo [Labelle Déesse] in 2018, and she was a huge supporter as I started working on the project. She was on the advisory committee and worked with me for a long time.”
“A lot of the people who are in the film are people I’ve been talking to for almost 10 years,” Bedward says when asked about earning the trust of skeptical Vodou practioners who have been misrepresented before. “When I first approached them about the film, I’d always come from my personal connection to it and why I wanted to tell this film. Because I’m not Haitian, and I’m also not a Vodou practitioner. But I’ve always been very interested in African traditional religions, especially in the diaspora.”
Bedward kept them in the loop during the entire process, and those relationships are reflected in the final film, which includes a touching post-credit scene.
The filmmaker also reiterates how much support she received from horror fans, which also contributed to her eventual embrace of the genre. So much so, that she’s no longer a zombie film novice.
“I would say my favorite zombie film is Atlantics. For those who don’t know, it’s directed by a Senegalese filmmaker, Mati Diop, and it looks at the migrant crisis through this narrative of the zombie. It’s this haunting film, an amazing zombie film, and everyone should go watch that.”
