White Zombies and Black Horror

In a sugarcane mill in rural Haiti, a cane grinding pit emits a creaking groan as a ring of hollow-eyed men push the mill arms around and around. More men ferry bags of sugarcane up and down the warehouse mezzanine. One stumbles and falls backward into the bladed pit. He does not scream. The others push on, heedless of the casualty. As long as their master lives, their work will never end. 

This scene from Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932) illustrates the terror at the center of the zombie myth: loss of personhood and autonomy. The secondary antagonist Charles Beaumont (Robert W. Frazer) observes the mysterious Murder Legendre’s zombie-run sugarcane mill with horror. Later, he sits beside his love Madeleine, made into a zombie in a foolish attempt to steal her from her betrothed, and laments the loss of her soul, the missing light in her eyes. This is the central conflict of his character. But that first scene, where Beaumont, a plantation owner himself, is horrified by supernatural subjugation of men, is most exemplary of the fear that caused white writers to appropriate the zombie myth from Haitian culture. Almost certainly, Monsieur Beaumont’s plantation is run by native Haitians, and almost certainly, the working conditions are not much better. So why does the sugarcane mill of the villain Legendre leave him so stricken? 

My guess? It’s because Legendre’s zombie slaves are nearly all white. 

White Zombie was inspired by William Seabrook’s adventurist travelogue The Magic Island, published three years prior. The Magic Island is an account of Seabrook’s experience while visiting Haiti and is the first popular representation of zombies in English-language media. Seabrook adapts the concept, erroneously, from the Haitian Voodoo religion, which is itself a combination of West and Central African religions and spiritual practices developed during and after slavery under Christian—primarily Catholic—masters. Seabrook describes having a fright upon meeting the eyes of one of these zombies toiling on a small farm:

 “Obediently, like an animal, he slowly stood erect — and what I saw

then, coupled with what I had heard previously, or despite it, came as a

rather sickening shock. The eyes were the worst. It was not my

imagination. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind,

but staring, unfocused, unseeing. The whole face, for that matter, was

bad enough. It was vacant, as if there was nothing behind it. It seemed

not only expressionless, but incapable of expression.” (p. 183)

Opposite to the reaction of academics, who were highly skeptical of Seabrook’s tales, early Hollywood responded to The Magic Island and the resultant White Zombie with fascination and an explosion of zombie movies: Revolt of the Zombies (1936), King of the Zombies (1941), The Corpse Vanishes (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), etc.

I believe the fixation on zombies was, at its core, an extension of what Toni Morrison describes in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), a literary critique of great American authors like Poe, Hemingway, Twain and Melville. Like much of American history, Morrison says that the white literary identity was built upon the presence of Black Americans. Questions of freedom, autonomy, and morality are often played out in, reflected by, or inspired by Black characters written by white authors. These characters, such as Tom and Chambers in Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), are used as a space to explore the guilt, worry, and anxiety of contemporary white society. This is why Beaumont is so afraid of Legendre’s undead white slaves, and why classic Hollywood became so infatuated with the myth: zombies reflect the quiet, pervasive fear of the oppression they have historically perpetrated and benefited from being forced upon them.

The zombie has since developed into a more complex symbol, representing fear of futility, isolation, and the end of the world as we know it. George Romero’s titanic contributions to the genre are mostly responsible for this shift, as evidenced by the spat of ‘70s and ‘80s zombie films like Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2. However, the racialized origins of the zombie are still visible beneath the surface of the acclaimed gore-fests. In 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, one of the earliest scenes features a shoot out between a mostly white SWAT team and the residents of a Philadelphia housing project, who are mostly Black and Puerto Rican. Out of grief and religious notions of honoring the dead, the residents are harboring a number of their zombified relatives, friends and neighbors. SWAT is there to contain the spread, and ostensibly to protect those still living, but at least one officer is desperately excited for an opportunity to “blow their Puerto Rican and [racial epithet] asses right off.” Romero was clearly conscious of how the omnipresent concept of race might play into a world of heightened chaos, violence, and yearning to survive (at least, he was aware by the time of Dawn—some sources report that Romero and John Russo, co-writer of the earlier Night of the Living Dead, didn’t actually set out to comment on race). Furthermore, those who turn are otherized, literally becoming “colored” even if they were white in life, by a blue-gray cast to the skin that identifies them as undead.

In tandem with the commentary on American consumerism later in the movie, the representation of zombies as a mindless, overwhelming hoard, an army of the other, both distinct from and reflective of the protagonists and the viewer, once again evokes Morrison’s shadow in the white imagination.

Here in the 21^st century, the zombie apocalypse has taken over the sub-genre. There are some trace elements of those early racial overtones, like in the treatment of video game protagonist Lee Everett of Telltale’s The Walking Dead: Season One. But as zombie media has become international, spreading not unlike a disease, the fear of infection and the violence inherent to man have become the most popular readings. By the late 2010s, we reached a severe level of oversaturation, leading to disinterest and a loss of real meaning. 

The 2020s, on the other hand, have so far brought a revival of another popular monster: the vampire. Nosferatu (2024) grossed $181.3 million globally and received critical acclaim. Sinners (2025) brought a Southern Gothic element to the new wave, with complex ideas about the often insurmountable subjugation of the Jim Crow era central to its narrative. In short, we’ve come a long way since Twilight. (I say that with all love and respect for the beautiful insanity of Stephanie Meyers’ creations, to be clear).

Is it possible to rehabilitate the zombie in the same way? I recently requested and received an ARC copy of indie author Radley Veljohnson’s Underground Railroad Undead. The title brings to mind Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), a fairly unserious, if entertaining, addition to vampire canon. But from what I’ve read of Underground, it appears to be thoughtful examination of the horrors of Southern plantations, reminiscent of classic slave narratives and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, which is only bolstered and expanded upon by the zombification and supernatural violence leveled against Black bodies. 

In his own book of literary criticism, Michael Eric Dyson says of Playing in the Dark: “[it] is also about a black intellectual seizing of the interpretive space within a racially ordered hierarchy of cultural criticism.” Sinners and its recent predecessors in the field of Black-centered horror are great examples of that intellectual seizure. Underground showcases the potential for zombies to get the same treatment as their bloodsucking contemporaries, a potential made even more concrete by the complicated and racialized history of the walking dead.