‘Black Zombie’s’ Maya Annik Bedward: Horror is So Much Bigger Than the Scares [Interview]
Dread Central spoke to Maya Annik Bedward about the inspiration for ‘Black Zombie’ and African Traditional Religions on the big screen.
![‘Black Zombie’s’ Maya Annik Bedward: Horror is So Much Bigger Than the Scares [Interview]](https://www.dreadcentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/black-zombie-e1786552541326-1600x900.jpg)
As a horror fan, one of my favorite things about the genre is that its films are actually so much bigger than gremlins, ghouls, guts, and gore. A documentary that captures this beautifully is Black Zombie, directed by Maya Annik Bedward. The film charts the history of the zombie, from the fields of Haiti — vodou priests and priestesses — to the twisted-up lore that visiting White folks brought back home.
While modern zombie flicks may have lost these racial connotations, learning the origins of these creature features will make you see the zombie movies with fresh eyes. Bedward arrived at Black Zombie out of pure curiosity, she explained to Dread Central. “A lot of my personal passions have stemmed from me wanting to have a better sense of where I come from and my ancestry,” the filmmaker told me over Zoom.
“I’m a history nerd, and I was always really frustrated in school when I wanted to learn more about Black history, especially here in the Americas before colonialism,” she continued. “Often, people would say we just don’t have a record of that, and I found that really frustrating.” This led her to learn more about diasporic practices such as Santería, Obeah, and vodou. Bedward was shocked, just like I was watching her documentary, to find the connection between zombies and Haitian vodou.
“I was like, ‘How do I not know that?”,” adding that she was “blown away” to discover how Hollywood had taken the zombie myth, run away with it, and caused vodou and other African Traditional Religions (ATRs) to be misconstrued as evil.
Can Horror Ever Get ‘Witchcraft’ Right?
Anyone in the Global West whose spiritual practices fall outside the Abrahamic religions faces an uphill battle. Social acceptance is low, and often movies don’t help. For pagans, it took until 1996 to get a film like . While the movie may be imperfect in its depiction of the practice — something Wiccans were loud about at the time — , with many citing the film as a key source of empowerment.