Original subtitles

There is this long history

and fascination

with zombies in American cinema.

Zombies is all about the power beyond the grave.

Something that you don't understand,

that a scientist can't explain.

There's nothing left of the corpse

but brains and limbs, but still, it functions.

You could be perfectly fine one minute,

and be intact the next minute.

It wants me!

This idea that things turn unexpectedly,

and that you have to be ready to run.

That's the scariest thing.

Something about that relentless thing

that the zombies represent,

where they just, nothing stops them.

Oh.

Chardonnay.

They don't die, and they just keep coming.

The zombies typically rolls very slowly.

You can run as fast as you wanted,

they would always kill you.

Zombies have become really popular

in modern culture.

Well, howdy strangers!

Twelve years of The Walking Dead.

The Last of Us streaming on HBO.

People's taste for it is obviously insatiable.

But why are people

so hungry for it?

It didn't happen with werewolves.

It's just a really compelling idea.

You know, your loved ones are not there anymore

and there are these shuffling things

that will bite you and make you into one of them.

Almost like mass culture and opaciously consuming.

The main things about the zombie,

and why it's got such an enduring appeal

is that it raises questions

about autonomy and agency.

You can hear me.

Yes.

How much autonomy do we have?

How in control are we of our minds,

of our desires, of our consciousness?

I think the story of zombies is tragedy.

These films ask us to think

about who we are

when we are devoid of our spirit.

It makes so much sense that the idea of a zombie

would come from a tradition of people who were enslaved.

That they would be able to imagine

what it is to be confined and imprisoned

on a physical level

and on a spiritual level as well.

Stop!

I think that it's time for people to put

the zombie in its historical context.

If we know where it comes from,

it brings up why we are portraying zombies as we are.

There are a lot of people who love zombies now,

who have no idea of its roots.

Ah!

Saint Domingue, which is the original name

of a French Haitian colony,

was, by far, the most lucrative

of the European colonies, period.

People made to work, by any means necessary,

to produce that wealth.

Every aspect of European life was fused with the wealth

that was generated by enslavement.

Saint Domingue has often been

described as something of a "powder keg"

that just by the sheer force of numbers of enslaved

versus non-enslaved people,

meant that the measures for repression

had to be incredibly brutal to overcome that disparity.

William Seabrook is a not-so-well-known now

travel writer and adventurer, who wrote The Magic Island,

which introduced the zombie into Western culture.

And yeah, a very eccentric figure,

and notorious, a cultist,

and sadomasochist, and alcoholic,

who had a very wild life.

His news stories were like,

"How I Escaped From the Giant Clam".

That was literally, like, one of the titles

of his news stories. So, he was a sensational writer.

I started researching him,

and then it just became a bit of an obsession.

I did graphic novel biography of him.

"The Abominable Mr. Seabrook".

Seabrook wanted to write a book about voodoo,

And his editor said no white man

could write a book about voodoo.

So, he took that as a challenge.

He moved to Haiti.

Tried to ingratiate himself in voodoo circles.

He's one of those white guys that wants to, like,

be part of the thing that is not part of his culture.

William Seabrook heard rumors

about this thing called the zombie.

He'd passed them off as local superstition.

Nothing to do with Vodou.

Huh?

But someone he was speaking to said,

"Oh, no, no, it's very real."

Huh?

Polynice is a farmer who tells Seabrook about zombies.

He goes, you know, this is not some old-fashioned thing

that used to happen, this is happening today.

Seabrook says that's like vampires working for Shell Oil,

or something.

Polynice takes them to a field.

These workers, they're harvesting cane.

He tries to speak to them.

There's not much response, just you know,

kind of blank eyes.

He's shaken up after he sees this.

He believes it.

This is the National Broadcasting Company.

The Magic Island was published in 1929,

and it was a best-seller.

It's credited with first usage of "zombie"

in the English language.

The Magic Island made Seabrook pretty wealthy.

The film rights were sold to Hollywood

and it was adapted into "White Zombie".

The first zombie film, White Zombie,

basically introduced the Western world

to the figure of the zombie.

They are not men. They are dead bodies!

Zombies.

Corpses taken from their graves.

Or made to work sugar mills.

Thieves at night.

White Zombie is about a couple of travelers,

a white man and his fiancée.

Their host is nefarious

and has designs on the woman.

The white zombie of the title

is put under the spell of the zombie master.

Her soul is gone.

I can't bear those empty, staring eyes.

The crux of it is that this power

that has been used to help fuel sort of labor,

is being misused now, to try to win this woman.

My darling, what have they done to you?

The zombie figure became a motif for a few years,

until the 1940s.

It played on the fear of voodoo sorcery,

and that some people can manipulate humans

and turn them into living dead.

Zombies?!

Yes, they are my servants.

The great fear in early zombie cinema

is not so much that you'll be attacked by a zombie,

but that you'll become one.

It's all about creating fear for white characters.

The scariest thing that can happen to you,

as the white traveler,

is that you visit this island of uncivilized natives,

and become infected with their zombiism.

And then you lose your agency and control to Black natives.

The zombie is adjacent to Vodou,

but not part of Vodou.

Meaning that Vodou is a fully developed

and complex spiritual phenomenon,

cultural reality, that involves possession

by divine spirits that enact realities

in the quotidian of individuals.

The zombie is a phenomenon of dispossession.

You're not empowered, or strengthened, or inhabited

by something greater than yourself,

you're denied yourself. Something is removed from you

to make you less than who you were before.

Which is the exact opposite of the Vodou faith.

Where the two sort of intersect

is through the sorcerer, or the Houngan,

the individual who can practice magic, essentially,

with the way it's understood, with the right hand,

which is magic for good and for service

as part of faith, or with the left hand,

which sort of this kind of corrupt or perverted.

It's like, the side hustle for a bad sorcerer,

type of thing. Like, I do zombification on the side.

But it's really something separate from the faith

in which Haitian individuals and communities are steeped.

My name is La Belle Déesse Jr.

I'm a fourth generation Haitian Vodou Priestess,

born and raised in Haiti.

I was chosen by the spirits.

When I was 15 years old, I got possessed

for the first time while my mom was having

a ceremony for someone.

Vodou is a part of who we are.

It's an identity that we have within us.

It's in our DNA.

Most Haitian people are Catholics and Vodouisants

at the same time, but they believe

they're more Catholic than Vodouisant,

because the Vodou is always hidden.

Back in the days,

when our ancestors did it,

if the slave masters would come along

and find them doing something that had to do with Vodou,

they would get hanged or get killed.

So, that's how everything got incorporated.

The Catholic prayer, Catholic images.

They used it to cover while they were doing

their own Haitian Vodou ceremonies.

They were protecting themselves

and they had to hide behind a veil.

After the colonial periods,

practicing Vodou was illegal under the constitution of Haiti.

The anti-sorcery legislation of the Haitian constitution

was used to justify arresting Vodouisants

throughout the country.

The United States occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934.

During that time, Vodou became a means

of manipulating the population

and forcing them to work to build the infrastructure.

The American Marines could go into villages

and arrest people and say you're practicing Vodou,

that's illegal under the constitution.

You've got to come with us and we're going to make you

do forced labor.

You had these sort of work gangs.

People who were pressed into service,

either via criminality or loitering,

or any number of kind of flimsy excuses

to be obliged to work for the Americans.

The people that Seabrook met,

who assumed to be zombies,

they were working for the Haitian American

Sugar Corporation, which used them forced labor

under the American military occupation.

For many Haitians, this was a return

to the state of slavery.

The correlation there is very precise

between slavery, zombiedom,

and the colonial plantation economy.

But Seabrook himself didn't extrapolate that.

Didn't seem to make too much of it.

I think all of the tropes that you see

in portrayals of Vodou in film and literature

are there, in The Magic Island.

Seabrook, he writes a film that is full of racist imagery.

The illustrations by Alexander King are racist.

The Magic Island is incredibly influential

on the North American perception of voodoo,

and it kind of set the tone.

We start to see depictions of Black people as zombies,

somehow related to voodoo.

Whether it's the Voodoo witch that can have power over you

as a white person, or the voodoo doll.

That if you make a doll that looks like somebody,

and you stick it with a pin...

you could cause them pain.

- What's she doing? - She's making voodoo.

Ooh!

Hollywood didn't have a lot of nuance

when it came to depicting Black religion and zombies.

One of the voodoo people got into your house last night.

They literally saw Blackness as evil.

And our religion as evil.

Gee, Peter, how do you ever expect to get to heaven

with one foot in the voodoo houmfort,

and the other in the church?

Aw, get along with ya.

Some of this native nonsense.

Blackness and voodoo

became the monstrosity of the story.

The contemporary zombie is unrecognizable

from its roots in Haiti.

A zombie is, is a creature

that only cares about eating you.

There's nothing on their mind.

Their whole way, their whole purpose for being here

is simply to kill you.

I love the teeth, I love the eyes.

I love the intensity of the gaze,

and the, uh... quirks.

Ooh, you're so scary!

A scary thing is to think about the idea

of everybody coming back to life from the dead

and crawling out of the ground.

If you think about Michael Jackson's "Thriller"

and the way that they all kind of came up and came together.

I think it's interesting to think about

dealing with your past, or dealing with

the undead part of your history.

It's very direct how the contemporary,

flesh-eating zombie came into existence,

and that was George A. Romero's film,

"Night of the Living Dead".

Came out in 1968.

They're coming to get you, Barbara.

Look, there comes one of them now!

He's coming to get you, Maya...

No! No! No!

Suddenly, a new version of the zombie

enters everybody's popular imagination.

Good Lord.

A ravenous, risen-from-the-grave,

apocalyptic subhumans.

People gradually forgot that there'd been anything

about voodoo sorcery to do with the zombie,

and it became just this voracious ghoul thing.

It's just so unique and original

and shocking for its time.

It's still shocking when you watch it.

Eh, didn't scare me much when I was a kid.

Zombies, when I was a kid, White Zombie, and whatever,

they weren't heavy, white-fright material.

All zombies did in those movies is try to strangle somebody

or throw somebody against the wall.

That was about it.

They just weren't very scary until we made them flesh-eaters.

This is the main cast and crew of Night of the Living Dead.

And this picture was taken in the yard of the farmhouse.

And this is me, John Russo.

And this is George Romero.

George was the one that convinced us

we could make movies in Pittsburgh.

We thought we would maybe make

some kind of science fiction thing,

but found out we just couldn't afford

to show any kind of saucer landing,

or that was too much, you know?

So, we had to come up with some kind of

straight horror idea.

I said, "Well, why don't we use my flesh-eating idea?"

He said, "That's good."

We were inventing these flesh-eating zombies

as we went along.

Zombies in Night of the Living Dead

were much deadlier than their zombie predecessors.

They could literally rip your guts out.

Just because they wanted to.

Not because someone told them to.

Their whole mission and existence was to attack you.

Night of the Living Dead was probably

the first official zombie movie

that I can really recall seeing.

I went in with my mom and her girlfriend

to a drive-in.

That was the first movie I ever saw

that genuinely scared me.

That had me really sort of like,

hiding behind the seats, you know?

When the picture opened,

they had to turn people away from the drive-ins.

Cars were backed up out on to the main highway.

They started pulling more prints,

and everywhere it went, Cleveland, Philadelphia,

New York, everywhere, the figures were huge.

Night of the Living Dead became a cult classic.

These images from that film, of the zombies

and the girl eating the bugs, and everything,

are just so engrained in our culture.

Wave of murder which is sweeping

the eastern third of the nation

is being committed by creatures

who feast upon the flesh of their victims.

Night of the Living Dead looked like a news broadcast.

It was gritty, black and white.

It was like what you were watching every night.

Crimes and horrible things that were happening

were coming to you in your living room TV.

And here's Night of the Living Dead

that looked the same. So, it was very real, I think.

It had a very real feeling to it.

All law enforcement agencies,

and the military, have been organized

to search out and destroy the marauding ghouls.

I worked in television so long,

that maybe it's just an important part

of my background.

If I have people on the television

not really answering the question,

but making it more confusing, that's conscious.

That's been the conscious part of that.

Because that's generally what it's about, you know?

"Ladies and gentlemen, there was just a plane crash.

It took out a small piece of Manhattan. More later."

Night of the Living Dead

really had its finger on the pulse

of cultural fears that were shifting

in the wake of the Civil Rights Act,

the assassination of Malcolm X and Kennedy.

If you were in the white audiences

and you're worried about these racial gains,

and what does this Civil Rights Act mean?

Are they going to take all our jobs,

and take all our women, or whatever the fears were?

That's what the zombies seemed like to you.

And when you put on top of that

a Black lead in Duane Jones,

it's really pushing those buttons.

Romero always said that he didn't really

intentionally place a Black man at the center of this story

to further frighten people, although in retrospect,

I think it's one of the reasons we're still talking about

that movie the way we do today, is because of that casting.

There's this moment where she opens the door,

and there's Duane Jones standing there,

and behind him is one of these ghouls.

And for a split second, it's almost like

she doesn't know who's the one

I'm supposed to be afraid of, right?

In Night of the Living Dead,

the character, if you read the script...

It's all right.

...the character is never described

in terms of his color.

And Duane was the best actor that we knew

from among our friends, which is where

we cast that film,

the way we cast that film. And so, he did the part.

Now, consciously, we, I resisted

writing new dialogue because he happened to be Black.

One of the most lingering moments is the ending.

We've been with Duane Jones' character

through this entire film.

We've seen him behave with intelligence,

quick thinking, with authority.

He should be rewarded for that.

But instead, white mobs out looking for zombies...

Those same German Shepherds that were in Selma,

in Birmingham.

And the guns.

He's the lone survivor in the house,

standing by the window, awaiting rescue.

All right, hit him in the head,

right between the eyes.

Good shot! Okay, he's dead. Let's go get him.

That's another one for the fire.

The white mobs shoot him dead.

It's a real punch in the stomach.

All right, send the wagons through.

That ending had to be very devastating for Black audiences.

People have written about these films and say,

well, if you really look deep underneath,

you'll find these things.

And I don't think they're deep underneath at all.

They're sort of right there in your face.

My late mother,

Patricia Stephens Due, loved horror.

She always had those old Universal

black and white movies on.

Creature from the Black Lagoon, Wolfman, you name, it,

vampires, zombies, whatever.

But as I've gotten older, I now understand better

that my mother's love for horror was not the same as me going,

"Whee! Monsters!"

I really think that it was her way of grappling

with state violence that she suffered

during the Civil Rights Era in the 1960s.

She was a young college student in 1960.

She and several students conducted a sit-in

at a Woolworth lunch counter in Tallahassee, Florida.

They were all arrested.

And my mom spent 49 days in jail.

And while she was taking part in a non-violent protest...

...a police officer threw a tear gas canister in her face.

And for the rest of her adult life,

she wore dark glasses.

So, that was a very visible scar

and a visible reminder of her trauma

that she always lived with. And it's like,

all these years later, it's like oh yes,

she had all this anger, she had all this fear,

which is the real fear. So, I think horror, for my mom,

was a huge outlet in letting go of fear,

letting go of trauma. And as I've gotten older,

it serves that function for me,

consciously more and more,

and not just something that I think is fun.

This is--

Brother! Good Lord!

Stop playing with his tongue.

I got a telegram from George and it said,

"Hey, we got another gig.

Start thinking of ways to kill people."

And it was "Dawn of the Dead".

Now, if you've seen Dawn of the Dead,

80 percent of that is stuff that I came up with.

Tell me what you're doing right now.

Okay, these are foam Latex appliances

I'm sticking on his face. He's a zombie.

Or people that have died in interesting ways.

Or not interesting ways, just people who have died

and come back to life.

You know, the old movies

didn't have any gore.

Frankenstein, Dracula,

there's not a drop of blood. No fangs.

I think audience expect gore now.

It's almost like they feel like they're going to disappoint

an audience if they don't show it.

We went from black and white with circles over their eyes,

to half their face is missing.

It became a gorefest.

I mean the first effect in Dawn of the Dead

was when the guy bites a chunk out of his wife.

You know, the cast and crew were laughing,

and then applauding.

"Is that what this is going to be like?"

You know, this is the first thing in the movie?

What's the rest of it? You know, we're blowing off heads.

The guy that gets the top of his head cleaned off

with a helicopter blade,

that got applause in the theatre.

I mean, my name for a while,

which I don't like anymore,

is "The King of Splatter", "The Wizard of Gore".

You know, just "Maestro" would be fine.

When we're creating this stuff,

we're not thinking about "This is too much".

We're making it as outlandish as possible.

And you know, George really went for that.

Any filmmaker who's dealing in horror,

I think it should always be a question of intention.

You know, why are you showing the thing that you're showing?

For many people, it is going to be, you know,

"I just want a physical reaction to something gross."

Our Father who is Heaven, give us this day--

But you know, as someone who depicts films

about Black people on screen,

I have to be very intentional about showing harm be done

to Black bodies, because we are so desensitized to it.

Mama?

Mama?!

I have described my films

as being in the canon of Black Southern gothic horror.

And what that means to me, at least,

is combining these themes

about loss, and death,

and decay, and transformation,

and seeing that through the eyes of Black people

who have lived and grown up in the South.

Because that's, you know, that's my lens.

Excuse me?

There's a real history of extractivism

with Black stories in films and in television.

And I think it's really important for anyone,

anyone who wants to tell a story, to make a film,

to make a song, to create something,

to understand what it is about that creation

that they connect to in some way.

Zombies, the living dead,

have for years been the staple ingredient of second-rate

horror movies. But is there any truth

behind the Hollywood fantasies?

A couple of years ago, Newsnight took a look

behind the cinema clichés,

and found that on the West Indian island of Haiti,

truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

People are transformed into the living dead

as a voodoo punishment.

Everyone had kind of forgotten about

the Haitian roots of the zombie figure.

But it came back into popular imagination

because of these discoveries of these real-life

zombies in Haiti.

This man is a zombie.

He died, or so his family thought.

He was buried, but then exhumed, and sent off to slavery.

The potion that put him into this state

contains a deadly poison.

A poison that American scientists now believe

could hold new clues to the nervous system,

and open up the possibility of human hibernation.

In the early 80s, the Canadian ethnobotanist,

Wade Davis, was employed by his university

to go to Haiti, to check out the reality

of this zombie potion that could make people go

into a death-like state,

and they could then be resurrected and walk around,

as if they were alive.

I was a graduate student at Harvard

under Professor Richard Evans Schutles.

And one day he just asked if I was interested

in going down to Haiti for a couple of weeks.

So, my very narrow task was to go to Haiti,

see if I could find someone who would make the preparation,

and then bring back the ingredients.

If a poison did exist in Haiti

that could quote, unquote, make zombies,

it had tremendous medical possibilities.

I went down to Haiti and I became absolutely appalled

at the chasm between what I experienced of Vodou,

of the beauty of the faith,

and the explicitly racist way

the Haitian zombie had been used

to denigrate an entire people.

And I'll never forget the first day I arrived

in Haiti in 1982.

I attended a Vodou ceremony,

where I experienced something that had eluded me

in four years in the Amazon,

and that was a window, truly wide open,

to the mystic. Responding--

Wade Davis wrote one of the most influential books

about zombies, The Serpent and the Rainbow.

He wrote that book in a film noir,

adventure story detective style.

Throughout Serpent and the Rainbow,

Wade Davis represents himself

as a kind of white adventurer figure

going into remote lands

and encountering dangerous, exotic beings.

And this is very much in keeping with the,

what's called the "white savior complex".

There is a parallel with Wade Davis and Seabrook.

I think they're both drawn to exploring other cultures

and travel, and trying to connect.

With Seabrook, he's always thrown himself

into the middle of the story.

And yeah, Wade Davis does the same thing.

The book was like an Indiana Jones,

Boy Zone adventure story.

He was willing to go into the heart of darkness

and return with the voodoo secrets

that he'd stolen from the sorcerer, if you like.

This is a memento. He kept this sample

of the drug used to make zombies.

I just keep it as I keep mementos

of all the journeys I've made.

My book was a very legitimate and sincere attempts

to make sense out of sensation.

I don't think there's anything that perpetuated

a stereotype about zombies.

The film made of The Serpent and the Rainbow absolutely does.

He then sold the book to Hollywood

who went and made a horror film version of his book.

A very controversial film by the director

of Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven.

From Wes Craven,

director of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Comes a story of the forbidden world

between life and death,

The Serpent and the Rainbow.

Which did exactly what horror films do,

which is to accentuate the most negative,

sinister, dark sides of Vodou.

Ow!

And create another racist stereotypical picture.

All of the racist tropes, the savagery of it all,

just all comes out in these adaptations.

Just like Seabrook's White Zombie.

He lost control of the narrative.

Portrayal of Haiti is like, this is a terrifying place.

Don't go there. They're going to nail your nuts to a chair.

Even at the moment when the film tries

to celebrate Vodou,

that immediately gets turned into a love scene

between the white protagonist and the Black researcher.

It's like the only time we get to see Vodou

in a somewhat positive light is just so he can get laid.

The white hero figure has sex

with his doctor informant from the hospital in a cave.

And then during the night, he's visited by a zombie

with a tiny little voodoo doll,

which has a snake jump out of his face.

You can't even imagine why anyone in their right mind

would follow a faith that looked like this, right,

the way it's depicted in the film.

It's like a circus sideshow.

Of course, everybody held me responsible for the fact

that Wes Craven and Universal made a horror movie.

Of course, I had no control whatsoever.

I never spoke badly about the film

because, you know, it bought me a house.

And I've never really been back to Haiti since the revolution.

And I focused four years of my life on Haiti.

You know, I lived there off and on for two years

and spent two years writing books.

I never set out to be a Haitian expert.

I simply moved on.

I think Vodou for me was all

sort of fun and games as a kid growing up.

And I, like with most horror stuff,

I was fascinated by it. I was obsessed with it.

My mom was very spiritual, so she believed in Vodou.

You know, I met some of the practitioners and stuff

that she saw, so, I was always under the impression

that it was a very delicate line you could cross

into a darker plane.

But that magic, in general,

didn't all have to be bad, you know?

In Canada, we have close to 250,000 Haitian

altogether, growing every day.

Out of the 250,000, I would say most of us are Vodouists,

but then we will not admit to being a Vodouisant

because they're afraid of being judged.

-Merci. -Merci.

Being a Vodouisant is who you are.

That's your identity.

And you shouldn't have to hide it

just because you're afraid of what people will say about you.

When I first started practicing, I was afraid.

It took a little while before I could sort of

break down this notion of Vodou

being associated with fear.

The tourism industry in New Orleans

is centered around these, like, heinous depictions of Vodou.

We pass through a bunch of voodoo shops

with, like, cheap little dolls and things like that.

People have built an entire industry

out of the tropes that have been created about Vodou.

I would say anyone who finds themselves demonizing Vodou

should really look inward and ask where that comes from

and who taught them to see it in that way.

The moment you say "Vodou",

they don't want to hear anything.

They think about sticking pins into a doll

and next thing you know, you're going to kill me.

Next thing you know, you're going to destroy my life.

Next thing you know, I'm no longer the same person

because you're going to do voodoo on me.

They think you're able to turn them into a zombie.

To me, zombie is just a business.

It's not really Vodou itself.

People would take different stories about Haitian Vodou

and slavery and put them together to make money.

Merci.

The Haitian Revolution

started in 1791

and ended officially on January 1st, 1804.

It was a war for the abolition of slavery

and for the granting of civil rights

to those who lived in the colonies

under enslavement.

On the night in August in 1791,

a group of slaves gathered and performed a ceremony.

An oath was sworn to overthrow their white colonial regime.

And that kick-started the Haitian Revolution.

The broad strokes of it are a Vodou ceremony

that happened in an area known as the Bois Caïman.

Bois meaning woods, and Caïman meaning caiman,

as in an alligator that was indigenous to Haiti.

This is the origin story of this revolutionary moment

that Haitians go back to as the source

of their ultimate refusal to remain bound

in this enslaved state.

And it's grounded very much again in Vodou,

in spirituality, in appeal to the gods

that watch over the Haitian people

in their daily life to this day.

The Haitian people

brought a European empire to its knees

in ways that were unprecedented

and set quite the example for enslaved populations

elsewhere in the American hemisphere.

Most people don't know about

the Haitian Revolution because of very deliberate

silencing of that past.

Colonial powers had to make sure

that the ideas of emancipation didn't spread,

and they had to make Haiti a failure.

After the Haitian Revolution

and the Declaration of Independence,

most of the major international powers

refused to trade with Haiti.

So, it couldn't continue exporting the products

which had made it wealthy in the first place.

Haiti was then crippled economically.

In the early part of the 19th century,

one of the Haitian presidents had to make a deal with France

that France would continue trading with Haiti,

if Haiti paid reimbursements to pay back the slaveholders.

Which it didn't finish paying off 'til 1948.

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.

Oh, these people are out there in Haiti

sacrificing people and turning people into living dead.

We're justified in taking over their banks.

It can't be really underestimated,

the ways in which culture can do the work of statecraft.

I thought Vodou was something

everyone was frightened of.

They're getting a little voodoo on us.

Juarita, is it true

there is to be a sacrifice tonight?

Sacrifice? Who's sacrificing what?

One of the dominant tropes in the voodoo

horror narrative is the ritual ceremony

deep in the woods, late at night,

the sound of drums.

The demon African god,

which culminates in a human sacrifice, usually.

Often this human sacrifice will be a white woman.

Well, surely you don't think she's alive

in the hands of natives?

Oh no, better dead than that.

In the ceremony of Bois Caïman,

a lot of people always confuse the ritual

as if it was to make a pact with the devil,

rather to protect the tribe that was going to war.

They got together and swore a pact to the devil.

They said, we will serve you

if you'll get us free from the French.

-Hmm. -It's a true story.

But ever since, they have been cursed

by one thing after the other, desperately poor.

Right after the earthquake, a number

of folks argued that what had happened to Haiti

was sort of a punishment for Vodou, for this ceremony.

So, this idea that somehow Bois Caïman forever doomed

Haitians because of the blood sacrifice of a pig.

The Haitian Revolution is what a lot

of people hate Haiti and Haitian people for.

Who were we, Blacks with nothing?

No guns and to be able to fight this big war...

and to win. But we did it.

When you do not have control of something, it's powerful.

It's by design that we understand Vodou

and any Black spiritual practices as something demonic.

Anything that is able to place power

into the hands of Black people,

spiritual power, you know, it's scary.

Whether the power comes from the Vodou

or the power just comes from the gathering,

it's still power,

and that's what makes it frightening.

The fear of zombies and Vodou

is all about fear of Blackness.

Of emerging Black power

and not knowing what to do to confront it.

Whose funeral is it?

Yours.

And what's really underlying the fear,

what's really underlying it, is fear of payback.

That we will rise up

and do to you what was done to us.

The more that I deepen

my spiritual practice and the more that I deepen

my creative practice,

I'm able to recall the stories

that are in my blood, in my body, in my ancestry.

There's power in that, because otherwise,

they would have been lost.

Stories give us the power to correct histories,

to imagine the future.

Let me in! Let me in!

Stories give back to us what was taken.

Lead us home.

The zombie thing seems to be sticking around

a lot longer than the possible next stage

of what horror movies are going to be.

Part of the culture,

they become almost as familiar as vampires.

You know, I half expect

to see The Count on Sesame Street

developed a relationship with a zombie, you know?

I never thought the zombie walk

would get as big as it gets.

By the end of the walk,

I was getting around 15,000 zombies.

And that spawned many more zombie walks

throughout the world.

Name something you know about zombies.

Christy.

Black.

They're Black. Okay.

The Black zombies!

You have no right!

Over time, Hollywood horror

has created the metaphorical zombie.

They're not Black, but I would argue

that they represent otherness

and they represent the invasion of otherness.

Zombie films remind me of the extreme measures we take

to keep other people out.

And so, when you see kind of like

hordes of people pressing up against a wall

or trying to open a building.

Trying to get to nice white people

and their families.

All right.

If you've just seen like a zombie horde

in World War Z.

And then you also open the New York Times

and you see a picture of 80 migrants in a boat

meant for four people, you can't help but make

these kinds of associations between what you're seeing

in popular media and what you're seeing in the news.

I see the zombie horde as being this projection

of people who are suffering.

Because they're bent on destruction,

it is legitimate to kill them.

To wall them in

or wall them back.

What you end up with in American culture

is something far removed from the Haitian zombie,

but that serves as a weird bridge

and an inaccurate bridge to that culture.

Cut!

I think he was a bit more forward.

We're not asking people

to go and serve.

We're asking people to educate yourself,

to know the story.