By Chris Daemmrich
Night. Fog-shrouded fields beneath a moonless sky. In a barricaded mansion, terrified men and women prepare for an onslaught. Rifles locked and loaded, they prepare to defend their lives and property.
These men and women are not quite victims. They are enslavers, creators of the deadliest slave society the world has ever known. And out there is no zombie horde, but an army of free Black women and men, kidnapped to harvest sugarcane and indigo until death by disease or exhaustion. In 1791 on the island of Saint-Domingue, they rose up to take their freedom back by any means necessary. The Haitian Revolution terrified American enslavers with the possibility of their own death at the hands of Black people they’d convinced themselves were something less than human.
Combat between Haitian and French troops during the Haitian Revolution
Though we might not recognize it, White Americans created the cultural phenomenon of the zombie film to express our fears of righteous rebellion. We perpetuate anti-Blackness by casting the fictional zombie as a mindlessly violent racialized Other, and refuse to face the histories from which zombification emerges, or enslavement’s afterlives in present-day racial injustice. Fortunately, we can learn from powerful counter-representations which speak truth to the dominant narrative. These films turn the lens back on us and ask: who’s the real monster?
Any American tourist visiting New Orleans learns of the connection between zombies and voodoo. Both are rooted in the Caribbean, a region extending from South Louisiana to Suriname and Guyana on the northern coast of South America, encompassing islands including Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados. Dr. Toni Pressley-Sanon, author of Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender, and the Haitian Loas on Screen, writes that Haitian voudo originated with the vodon spiritual practice of the Fon and Ewe people, in present-day Togo and Benin. Kongo, Dahomey, Fon and Ewe from coastal West Africa made up the majority of the 800,000 people brought in chains to the island colony of Saint-Domingue, a wildly profitable source of sugar, coffee and indigo for imperial France. The brutal conditions of Caribbean sugar cultivation required the labor of vast numbers of enslaved people, who died faster than they could reproduce, necessitating ever-increasing importation to sustain profits built on blood.
Zombification as a practice of submission and control exists within syncretic religions practiced by Afro-diasporic people across the Caribbean. Dr. Pressley-Sanon argues that zombification expresses realities of experiences under slavery, including a loss of bodily autonomy, horrific bodily injury, and proximity to death. Incarceration, systemic disinvestment, extraction of resources, labor and culture: all are forms of living death in the long afterlife of enslavement, part of what Dr. Christina Sharpe calls its ‘wake’.
When the formerly enslaved won their independence in 1804, they called their new nation Haiti, the name given to the island by the indigenous Taino people with whom they allied in their fight for freedom. Even in independence, the afterlife of colonial domination haunted the nation as the French successfully demanded the payment of $21 billion to compensate enslavers. This debt, and Haiti’s pariah status as a free Black nation in a world of White empires, permanently damaged the nation’s economy. This instability provided pretext for American military occupation from 1915 to 1934, allowing American business interests to institute a neocolonial economic regime based on forced, often unpaid, labor. In addition to profits, American colonizers extracted captivating stories of contact with the undead. New York journalist William Seabrook wrote of workers at an American-owned sugar refinery in Port-au-Prince in 1915:
“The supposed zombies continued dumbly at work. They were plodding like brutes, like automatons. The eyes were the worst. … They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind but staring, unfocused, unseeing.”
A booming film industry hungered for stories of living death. The first-ever zombie picture was The White Zombie, released in 1932. In the film, inspired by Seabrook’s book The Magic Island, a White American couple visits occupied Haiti to get married. Evil Haitians turn the White woman into a zombie, before her husband saves her by killing the Haitians. This plot would be familiar to fans of another movie about a Black menace to White women, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 blockbuster Birth of a Nation (The Klansman), also resolved by Black death in the form of lynching. In the minds of a White public accustomed to enjoying public murder of Black people and obsessed with ‘the race question’, zombification was just another form of dehumanization which could justify violence against Black people and nations.
Poster for The White Zombie, based on William Seabrook’s The Magic Island, 1932
Ouanga, the second zombie film (1936), also set in Haiti, and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), set on a fictional Caribbean island resembling Haiti, illustrate Black zombies as threats to Whiteness in other ways. Ouanga stars Black actress Fredi Washington (star of 1934’s Imitation of Life, a drama of racial passing) as its voodoo priestess in the role of a Jezebel, or Black seductress, a stereotype uniquely dehumanizing and dangerous to Black women because it is used as a justification for sexual assault.
I Walked with a Zombie’s heroine, a single White nurse on a ‘humanitarian’ mission, is abducted by the Black leader of a voodoo ‘cult’. The iconic ‘monster carry’ image, featuring a dark-skinned Black man and an unconscious White woman, evokes familiar White supremacist patriarchal fears of Black male sexuality. They’re the same fears that animate strikingly similar images in 1933’s King Kong, as Soraya Nadia McDonald has written for The Undefeated.
Zombie leader Carre-four and heroine Betsy in I Walked with a Zombie, 1943
After World War II the popular zombie genre expanded to address other threats to dominant White American order like organized crime, socialism, the Soviet Union and nuclear bombs, including 1952’s Zombies of the Stratosphere and 1955’s Creature with the Atom Brain. Such films prefigure George Romero’s later use of the zombie genre to critique consumerism and the ‘deadening’ experience of late 20th-century American capitalist society.
In I Am Legend, published in 1954, author Richard Matheson imagines the transformation of human society into a world of zombie vampires. Human protagonist Dr. Robert Neville becomes an expert at murdering vampires in supposed self-defense but is captured by a “new race” of hybrid human-vampires to whom he is a mass-murderer. Matheson forces readers to question Neville’s choice to dehumanize a racialized Other just as the postwar Black civil rights movement began to force White Americans to do the same.
Unlike earlier zombie depictions set on Caribbean islands, I Am Legend and its 1964 and 1971 film adaptations, The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man, are set in cities of the American North and West then undergoing the dramatic transformation of the Second Great Migration. Millions of Black Americans, economically and politically disenfranchised under Jim Crow apartheid, followed rail lines and highways out of the South to seek better opportunities in booming industrial cities whose populations had previously been majority-White.
Future NRA spokesman Charlton Heston hunts postapocalyptic zombies while dressed like Thomas Jefferson in 1971’s The Omega Man
Millions of White people saw Black presence in “their” cities, workplaces, and public spaces as a threat, and White mobs seeking continued segregation instigated racial violence like the 1943 Detroit riot and protests against school integration in Boston. From New York to Los Angeles, White people protested emergent Black political power by supporting repressive policing and organizing vigilante violence. Within a context of racialized ‘Others’ overtaking White-dominated American cities, Dr. Neville’s murders take on new meaning, as does those ‘Others’ achievement of political power and their attempts to hold Dr. Neville accountable for his crimes.
In a revolutionary zombie film from 1968, at the inflection point between the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the threat of anti-Black racism is more explicit still. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was one of the first mainstream White films with a Black male protagonist, Duane Jones’ Ben. After saving the White people with whom he’s sheltered from zombie hordes, Ben is murdered by police at the end of the film. In a White imagination where zombies and Black people alike are threats to White survival, Ben does not need to be mistaken for a zombie; his living, Black body is threatening enough.
In standard interpretations zombies are what enslavers thought, and many White Americans today subconsciously think, Black people are. Mindless, inhuman, out for blood: “superpredators”, in Hillary Clinton’s words. Zombies are granted superhuman strength and size, characteristics Darren Wilson gave to Michael Brown and George Zimmerman ascribed to Trayvon Martin. In the globalized 21st century zombies aren’t just Black people, but other oppressed peoples with whom Black Americans often stand in solidarity. Filmmaker Matt Cornell notes that the zombies in Brad Pitt’s big-budget 2013 blockbuster World War Z include Palestinians who scale the apartheid walls Israelis erect around themselves.
Israeli wall and ‘Palestinian zombies’ in Brad Pitt’s 2013 World War Z
A notable number of the heroes positioned opposite zombies in recent American films are Black, from Will Smith as Dr. Neville in the 2014 I Am Legend (an adaptation of Matheson’s novel without the thought-provoking ending) to Danai Gurira as Michonne in TV’s The Walking Dead. A zombie film with a Black protagonist is not the same as a zombie film that challenges the genre’s racist tropes; it’s the “but I have a Black friend!” excuse expressed by White filmmakers who fail to challenge the anti-Blackness embedded in American zombie films since 1932. But if we understand the genre as beginning not with The White Zombie, but with the theft of agency, body, and culture that is the truly horrific history of enslavement, we see how zombie narratives in contemporary American films can challenge White supremacy.
Raymond Santana (Marquis Rodriguez), Kevin Richardson (Asante Blackk), Antron McCray (Caleel Harris), Yusef Salaam (Ethan Herisse), and Korey Wise (Jharrel Jerome) detained in When They See Us, 2019
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited enslavement except in the form of incarceration, and the construction of the prison-industrial complex as a ‘new Jim Crow’ and ‘prison slavery’ is well-documented. In Malcolm X (1992), Spike Lee depicts incarceration as a loss of control and agency over one’s own body, an experience in the Haitian tradition of zombification analogous to slavery. Denzel Washington’s Malcolm experiences a living near-death before converting to Islam while incarcerated, joining the life-restoring Nation of Islam through which he begins to articulate pro-Black politics. Ava Duvernay’s When They See Us (2019) heartbreakingly illustrates five Black and Latino teenagers’ experiences of criminalization as they are falsely accused of assaulting a jogger in Central Park. Like Malcolm X, each struggles under brutal conditions in prisons and jails.
The racist dehumanization experienced by the boys branded as the Central Park Five in 1991 was a product of a particular Reagan-era panic critiqued in what might be American pop culture’s most iconic depiction of zombies: Michael Jackson’s 1984 Thriller music video. In contrast to the wholesome 1950s countryside of the video’s opening sequence, American cities like the one through which Jackson and Ola Ray walk home past the graveyard were dangerous places. Crime spurred by disinvestment was on the rise, and young Black people of Jackson’s generation were increasingly criminalized by a growing carceral state justified to voters with anti-Black, misogynist myths like “crack babies” and “welfare queens”. Vincent Price’s creepy voiceover narrates White Americans’ fears: “Creatures crawl in search of blood/To terrorize y'alls neighborhood.” Jackson satirizes and subverts fears of young Black men as “superpredators” by riffing on the genre of monster films through which White people process our anti-Black stereotypes.
Daniel Kaaluya as Chris Washington in Get Out’s Sunken Place, 2017
In his 2017 film Get Out, Jordan Peele created a terrifying state of zombification without dangling limbs or dripping gore. Black protagonist Chris Washington’s powerlessness while trapped within the Sunken Place, and the transfer of his body to a White man who will use it against Chris’ will, is zombification once more as analogue to enslavement. The Sunken Place is a device which alienates Black people from control of their own bodies. Even when it threatens his own life to do so, Daniel Kaaluya’s Chris cannot ignore the humanity in other Black people who have been zombified, unlike the film’s White villains. Peele leaves viewers to conclude that the Armitage family never saw Chris’ humanity in the first place.
It is significant that these stories are presented by Black Americans. Early zombie films are based off source material from White American colonizers who did not recognize the humanity of the Black people they saw enslaved and exploited. A White stranger observes an incarcerated Malcolm Little in 1950, or Korey Wise in 2000. Who, or what, do they see? Fully realized human beings, or confined Black bodies making repetitive motions, with downcast eyes and despondent faces?
Protestors seeking justice for Breonna Taylor, Louisville, Kentucky, May 30, 2020
Depictions of violence against dehumanized, racialized bodies permeate White American zombie films. The history of these movies illustrates how these images perpetuate anti-Black stereotypes in real life, with deadly consequences. It is part of the racist conditioning that teaches White Americans like me to see a Black man like Ahmaud Arbery as a Black threat, and to consider the lives of Black women like Breonna Taylor unworthy of our concern. It justifies the policing that murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis and Tony McDade in Jacksonville. White filmmakers and viewers must question our perspectives, educate ourselves, demand and create antiracist media. We created and spread these racist lies, and they will kill again unless we take action to stop them.
This post was written by guest writer Chris Daemmrich. To read more of Chris' insightful work, check out his blog at https://www.rchrisdaemmrich.com/new-blog
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