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‘An embodiment of white fears’: how zombies went from Haitian spiritual tradition to Hollywood monsters

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The Hollywood sign above Los Angeles
File photograph: The Hollywood sign above Los Angeles. Seth Cottle / Unsplash. Illustrative context, not a photograph of this reported event.

Maya Annik Bedward’s fascinating new documentary goes beyond reductive imagery to place the zombie and vodou in their true historical context American film has a canon of racist disinformation that famously includes The Birth of a Nation , King Kong (1933) and Gone With the Wind . A new documentary makes a compelling argument that zombies, as presented, commodified and popularized by Hollywood, are part of the same tradition.

Black Zombie serves as work of restoration and correction, placing its faith in the quiet, persistent power of the truth as it stares down a tsunami of colonial erasure, denial, white-washing, violence and theft....

Read the original report at The Guardian.

Sources and context

The Guardian

Source headline and summary supplied via NewsData.io. First collected by NewsJaws on 2026-09-11. This is an automated news brief, not original NewsJaws reporting. Dates reflect the source publication. Feed delays may apply.