BLACK ZOMBIE at HOT DOCS
Toronto After Dark is proud to co-present BLACK ZOMBIE at the 2026 Hot Docs Festival!
Black Zombie (D: Maya Annik Bedward | Canada | 90 min)
From colonial Haiti’s haunted cane fields to the flickering screens of Hollywood horror, the living dead’s buried origins are unearthed and reclaimed as a symbol of survival and spiritual resistance.
Showtimes:
Fri, Apr 24, 9:15 PM - Hot Docs Cinema
Sat, Apr 25, 11:00 AM - TIFF 1
George A. Romero’s iconic Night of the Living Dead spearheaded an entire genre that has spawned hundreds of films and TV shows centred around flesh-eating monsters. Before their cinematic deviation, the origins of the reanimated dead can be traced back to 17th-century colonial Caribbean sugarcane fields and are connected to Vodou, a religion in which enslaved West Africans held the belief that death would free them to return to their homeland for their afterlife. If a landowner turned them into a zombie, however, their homeward passage would be interrupted and they would labour in plantations forevermore.
Director Maya Annik Bedward explores the damaging ongoing appropriation of the undead figure in popular culture to unpack the mythology and reclaim the zombie’s power as a symbol of survival and resilience. Extensive visual research and interviews with filmmakers, vodou practitioners and anthropologists juxtapose horror-film history with Haitian culture to create a pathway to understand the roots of the zombie in slavery and the spiritual significance of a lost body deprived of its soul. Alexander Rogalski
