Black Zombie: Voodoo, colonial consumption, and the monsterization of Haiti

This essay is Part Six in a series analyzing the zombie racial Other in media. It contains spoilers for Black Zombie (2026) and White Zombie (1932)

"In Haiti, everyone talks about zombies. But it's not like what they show on TV. It's not The Walking Dead. Here, zombies are real. Zombies are victims. Turning someone into a zombie is like putting them back into slavery. Forever."

These are the opening words of Black Zombie (2026), a documentary by Canadian filmmaker Maya Annik Bedward that traces the history of the pop culture zombie to its roots in Haiti—specifically, in the Afro-Haitian Vodou tradition. I saw it with a friend on a rainy October morning at the Chelsea Theater in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We took it in greedily. Seeing it on a Sunday was fitting, as we both regard the cinema as church and sanctuary. 

What Black Zombie achieves in 90 minutes is impressive. With insightful offerings from Black horror author and historian Tananarive Due, horror special effects maestro Tom Savini, Black surrealist horror writer and director Zandashé Brown, and a series of bona fide Haitian Vodou practitioners and other experts, Bedward's zombie manifesto delivers a thorough education on the zombie itself, its relationship to colonialism and the slave economy, and how it became one of Hollywood's favorite monsters.

Bedward uses imagery evocative of I Walked With a Zombie (1943), one of the earliest zombie films. A Black figure emerges from swaying rows of sugarcane to stand alone on the Haitian shore. Eyes stark and bulging, he looks to the stars as moonlit waves crash at his feet. This is where Vodou was born. This is where the zombie was born.

The transatlantic slave trade brought people from dozens of African nations and tribes to the Americas. In Saint-Domingue, which would become Haiti, the many belief systems from a diverse array of trafficked peoples merged into a new religion. "We brought something else with us," Vodou Priest François Yves Gregory says in Black Zombie. "The African brought with him his beliefs, his faith, his religion…We came from everywhere, from different tribes, different nations. Together, our ancestors built Vodou."

Vodou—or, rather, "voodoo"—would become a persistent aspect of Hollywood's horror tradition, accelerated by the creation of the pop culture zombie in Victor Halperin's White Zombie (1932). Vodou was further misappropriated in films like Ouanga (1936), Voodoo Man (1944), Voodoo Woman (1957), Voodoo Island (1957), Curse of the Voodoo (1965), and I Eat Your Skin (1971). Pop culture favorites like James Bond adventure Live and Let Die (1973), Scream Blacula Scream (1973), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), and the Child's Play/Chucky franchise (1988–present) treat voodoo as dangerous, dark magic and helped pave the way for similar misrepresentation in Tales from The Hood (1995) and modern works like American Horror Story (2011–present). 

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The Chelsea Theater curated an illuminating zombie double feature experience for patrons, pairing Bedward's Black Zombie with Southern blaxploitation classic Sugar Hill (1974). Diana "Sugar" Hill is out for revenge after the murder of her lover, the owner of Club Haiti in Houston, Texas. With the help of voodoo queen Mama Maitresse, Sugar summons Baron Samedi, who raises an army of zombie slaves to hunt down the murderers. In Black Zombie, François Yves Gregory sets the record straight: "Baron Samedi is a protector, a guardian. He is there when the dead cross over. He doesn't come to kill people." Even in a story about Black empowerment and righteous vengeance, the Vodou tradition has become distorted. 

Seeing Sugar Hill in juxtaposition with Black Zombie helped drive the documentary's thesis home: Since the Western world was made aware of the existence of Vodou, it has used the misunderstood religion to perpetuate racist tropes in media, painting Haitians and Vodou practices as savage and sinister. And the zombie lives at the heart of it all. 

The voodoo imaginary 

Most of the man's face was missing when he arrived at Jackson Memorial in critical condition. Surveillance footage showed a crazed attacker thrashing the man before biting into him. Even with a cop's weapon aimed, the attacker continued tearing into the poor man's flesh, naked and growling like a territorial beast. The cop fired, but one bullet wasn't enough. It took four more rounds to bring down the Miami Zombie. 

The autopsy found no human flesh in Rudy Eugene's stomach, but that didn't matter. Headlines dubbed him the Miami Zombie and the Causeway Cannibal. Police speculated that Eugene's sudden and violent derangement had been induced by "bath salts," a popular designer drug in 2012, but the toxicology report yielded no answers. Gruesome photos and videos circulated online, news reports sensationalized the story, and voodoo became a convenient scapegoat. 

Eugene was the son of Haitian immigrants, and his family ancestry was quickly embedded in the narrative. The massive earthquake in Haiti just two years before had already reignited Western interest in the nation, and the Miami Zombie's dramatization in the media only heightened that interest. Many theorized that a voodoo curse had driven Eugene to insanity. 

In "Haitian Vodou and Voodoo: Imagined Religion and Popular Culture," Adam M. McGee distinguishes between authentic Vodou and imagined voodoo—as in the Western understanding of Vodou that both embellishes and bastardizes the religion in its interpretations and projections. McGee explains, "Often, in these cases, voodoo is used as kindling. By kindling, I mean that voodoo is used to add flavor." 

The media raised the possibility that this was the start of a real-life zombie apocalypse, even asking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to comment. One official assured the public that the CDC "does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead or one that would present zombie-like symptoms." The spectacle of the Miami Zombie with the added sensation of Haitian mystique and voodoo curses "racialized Eugene, tapping into a public psyche that is familiar with tales of dark-skinned primitives and foreign cannibals."  

"Everyone says he was a Zombie. He was no Zombie," Eugene's mother said. "That was my son." Coverage of the attack demonized Eugene so much that no Haitian church in Miami would host her son's funeral. Friends and family upheld Eugene's devotion to Christianity as a rebuttal to the voodoo-focused news cycle. "He was raised in the church. He was in the choir," his father pleaded. But the appeal of the pop culture zombie was too enticing; the gravitational pull of Haitian voodoo was too immense. The story of Rudy Eugene could not escape their magnetism. 

I couldn't stop thinking about him while watching Black Zombie. 

Historian Carl Lindskoog notes that, when Haitian immigrants began arriving in Miami and other parts of South Florida in the 1980s, "it was really a deep racism and xenophobia that welled up there, and it was pressure on local officials and pressure on Washington to do something to exclude them and remove them from society." Eugene was born into this climate in 1981, but the anti-Haitianism in South Florida was merely a microcosm of the institutionalized anti-Haitian sentiment that has long existed in the Western world. 

The taboo regard of voodoo and disdain for Haitian people was deeply entrenched by Western media of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—in which Vodou practitioners were commonly "falsely accused of committing atrocities like cannibalism and human sacrifice during their ceremonies." This media fixation just so happened to coincide with growing U.S. interest and involvement in Haiti. 

After Haitian President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was assassinated in 1915, the U.S. invaded Haiti and forced the election of a new "pro-American" president in order to "prevent anarchy." President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) assured Americans that the invasion and occupation of Haiti was "necessary to save its citizens from the cycles of violence in the wake of several revolutions and political assassinations, and to make the world, in Wilson's words, 'safe for democracy.'"

This occupation precipitated "the theft of the country's financial reserves, the importation of the U.S. prison industrial complex, the torture and execution of freedom fighters…and a reframing of Haiti's constitution to grant 'foreigners land-owning rights.'" Journalists and other media makers who traveled to Haiti scandalized audiences with stories of cannibalism, ritual human sacrifice, and the black magic of voodoo, framing the U.S. occupation as a necessary interruption of these backward, ungodly practices.  

Settler-colonialism and propaganda are indivisible. The colonizing power must legitimize itself through potent contrivances, both to control public perspective of the colonized and to manufacture consent for settler-colonial occupation. Such contrivances are more effective and easier to weaponize when they can also pacify and amuse the masses—even better if they ultimately become fully embedded into the culture industry. Entertainment media is the perfect propagandist weapon. And, in the colonial consumption of Haiti, imagined voodoo and the pop culture zombie became powerful ammunition. 

Birth of a zombie 

"The appeal of voodoo (the imagined religion) in horror is not surprising, since for Europeans and white Americans, Vodou (the real religion) has always been greeted as a kind of horror." 

—Adam M. McGee, "Haitian Vodou and Voodoo: Imagined Religion and Popular Culture

The occupation of Haiti led to an increased curiosity about voodoo, and Westerners were most fascinated with the voodoo zombie. Western audiences had been reading stirring accounts of the "savagery" of Haitians since at least W. W. Harvey's 1827 publication, Sketches of Hayti: From the Expulsion of the French to the Death of Christophe. In 1884, Spenser St. John published Hayti, or the Black Republic, which emphasized the shocking "voodooism and cannibalism" practiced by Haitians. But it wasn't until 1912, just a few years before the U.S. invaded Haiti, that "the word zombie became associated with the living dead [when] an essay by Judge Henry Austin in New England Magazine [referred] to a Haitian poison that causes a comatose state in a victim that could be mistaken for death." 

Black Zombie illustrates how the zombie exploded in Western culture with occultist and explorer William Seabrook's The Magic Island in 1929, a travelogue in which he claims to have seen Haitian zombies working in sugarcane fields. 

"My first impression of the three supposed zombies was that there was something about them unnatural and strange. They were plodding like brutes, like automatons… The eyes were the worst. It was not my imagination. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing."

Hollywood bought the rights to The Magic Island and, ultimately, "justified further the brutish occupation [of Haiti] by creating the 'voodoo,' we now know, and the zombie films that became a basic staple." Seabrook's tale provided inspiration for White Zombie, released just two years before the U.S. occupation of Haiti ended in 1934. White Zombie follows a white newlywed couple on a trip to Haiti. There, they encounter the zombified slaves and a covetous sugar mill owner named Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi). A plot ensues that leaves the new bride transformed into a zombie under Legendre's influence and her husband battling against dark magic. 

This adaptation of Seabrook's work set the tone for depictions of Blackness and voodoo on screen. As Tananarive Due explains in Black Zombie, "Blackness and voodoo became the monstrosity of the story." In these works, white characters gawk at and are often terrorized by Black zombies who shuffle about with bulbous eyes and blank stares. These creatures align with how Seabrook describes the voodoo zombie in The Magic Island—as a "soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life." 

Following The Magic Island and White Zombie, imagery of voodoo-cursed Black zombie slaves became a Hollywood mainstay. Subsequent travelogues like John Houston Craig's Black Baghdad: The Arabian Nights Adventures of a Marine Captain in Haiti in 1933 and Cannibal Cousins in 1934, as well as Edna Taft's A Puritan in Voodoo-Land in 1938, further capitalized on Seabrook's success, each treating Haiti and voodoo with the same exoticism, racism, and colonial lens. And each published work provided Hollywood with more material to exploit in the growing voodoo horror canon and pop culture zombie mythology. 

A number of zombie films were produced in the tradition of White Zombie, each exploiting the Western fascination with and disgust of Haiti to entice audiences into theaters. Each entry depicted voodoo as evil, acting as fuel for cultural anti-Haitianism and justification for both foreign and domestic anti-Haitian policies. Kaiama L. Glover, Professor of French and African Studies, explains in Black Zombie.

"The more you can render people monstrous or claim that it's their behavior that calls for punishment, essentially, then the less you have to feel guilty about your practices as an individual, as a community, as a state. The zombie is a useful tool for that… It can't be really underestimated, the ways in which culture can do the work of statecraft." 

The pop culture zombie was created and projected on screen to solidify colonial myths, monsterize Haitians, and justify colonial extraction in Haiti as well as the repression of Black folks in the U.S. South—a critical connection to be explored later in this essay series. This long history elucidates precisely why Rudy Eugene's story could not escape the gravity of the Miami Zombie, and likely never will. 

Biotropes and phobogenesis 

Murder Legendre's sugar mill in White Zombie, and the Black zombie slaves who labor there, were directly inspired by William Seabrook's descriptions of Haiti. He speculated that only a zombie could endure the unthinkable working conditions—a rotting body made into a "servant or a slave…often simply as a drudge around the habitation of the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens." 

The zombies Seabrook claimed to have seen working in sugarcane fields were, in reality, Haitians under the colonial thumb of the Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO), which notoriously used forced prison labor. The zombie and the slave, one and the same. 

With Postracial Fantasies and Zombies: On the Racist Apocalyptic Politics Devouring the World, Eric King Watts examines "the emergence and assimilation of the biotrope of the zombie and the rhetorical labors it continues to perform" in entertainment media and the social imagination. A biotrope is, as its naming suggests, a trope of the body; a mythology attached to a particular form—via its race, gender, or other bodily classification—and reproduced by colonial powers through policy and propaganda. 

Watts argues that Seabrook was "trafficking in biotropes of strange Black powers" with The Magic Island. Its sensationalization of voodoo and zombification appealed to a colonial power that already viewed the Black body as an incubator of wickedness, corruption, and contamination. 

"Biotropes get under the skin and make the blood boil. They represent a fearful rationality between whitened bodies and populations and the blackened biothreat bodies putatively carrying toxicities and impurities."

The zombie itself is a biotrope, one which "indexes a history of terror, horror, revulsion, slavery, ecological trauma, and contemporary racialized violence." One that was seized upon during the time of U.S. colonial occupation in Haiti "as if it could replace the slave." This is why the biotropic zombie ultimately, and seamlessly, evolved from a voodoo-cursed unfortunate to a universal symbol of biological contagion and apocalypse. The zombie and the blackened biothreat, one and the same. 

Biotropes engender phobogenesis; the Black body becomes "a phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety." In Black Skin, White Masks, French psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon names (negro)phobogenesis as a process by which the Black body is culturally, psychically, and systematically converted into an object that produces a phobic response. It makes the Black body a site of inherent horror, a perpetual symbol of fear, disgust, hatred, and dread in the white imagination—a (bio)threat to civilization. 

We can trace a direct phobogenic lineage from Sketches of Hayti in 1827 to the colonial occupation of Haiti in 1915; from The Magic Island in 1929 to White Zombie in 1932; from the anti-Haitianism apparent in the treatment of Rudy Eugene in 2012 to the anti-Haitian policy and propaganda that endure even now. 

In 2021, we witnessed Border Patrol agents on horseback charging at Haitian immigrants along the Rio Grande, "swinging lariats" and herding them like cattle. While campaigning for the 2024 Presidential election, Trump and JD Vance amplified the false rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were abducting and "eating the pets of the people that live there." Trump also loves to reiterate the stereotype that Haitian immigrants "all have AIDS," a falsehood persisting from the CDC naming Haitians as a specific (bio)threat in the spread of AIDS during the initial 1980s panic. 

This year, the Trump administration stripped Haitian (and Syrian) immigrants of their Temporary Protected Status (TPS), using the biotrope of the Haitian as a (bio)threat to justify the decision. TPS, a protection originally granted to Haitians by the Obama administration following the earthquake in 2010, is intended to offer asylum "when the person's home country is experiencing difficulties or conflicts that make returning untenable, or a direct threat to the wellbeing and safety of that person." The decision to end TPS for Haitian immigrants sparked protests, and immigration advocates warned that it would "separate families and force people into a humanitarian crisis." Thousands of Haitians are now being forcibly returned to an insecure and unsafe homeland, while the U.S. neglects to acknowledge its role in the destabilization of Haiti. 

Pierre Damas Bel was only 20 years old—a young man from a Haitian immigrant family, a recent high school graduate, a soccer player, a JROTC member, a star student with a promising future at Ohio's Wright State University. After his family's TPS was eliminated, the Department of Homeland Security strapped a GPS monitor on his ankle, an effort by the department to surveil former TPS holders. Bel's future became uncertain. He didn't know if he could still attend college in the fall. He felt humiliated, criminalized, and dehumanized by the ankle monitor. He begged authorities to remove it, to no avail. Bel died by suicide in August. 

I couldn't stop thinking about him while watching Black Zombie. 

In the foreword for the 1986 edition of Black Skin, White Masks, postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha praises Fanon's work, as it demonstrates how "the phobic image of the Negro, the native, the colonized [is] deeply woven into the psychic pattern of the West." Black Zombie makes it clear that phobogenesis is an orchestration of settler-colonial violence, and the Haitian voodoo zombie is a mechanism of (negro)phobogenesis. This, too, is death-making. 

The pop culture zombie continues to labor as a biotrope symbolic of the subaltern in propagandist entertainment media—as Palestinian contagion in World War Z, as foreign combatants in militainment, as terrorist (bio)threat in horror films and disaster preparedness, as immigrant surge in video games and television series—precisely because it was created for this phobogenic purpose. And I am grateful to have found the inception, existence, and function of this monster laid bare by Black Zombie's careful lessons.