TV Review: EXHUMED: A History of Zombies (2020)

EXHUMED: A History of Zombies (2020) directed by David Schulte

The PBS-sponsored show Monstrum had a series of three episodes about zombies that have been put together as a 50 minute documentary on Kanopy. I was intrigued enough to watch it. Doctor Emily Zarka is an English professor at Arizona State University who hosts the series about various folkloric monsters. 

This documentary traces how the concept of zombies came to America, starting with the African spiritualism that came to Haiti via the slave trade. In the New World, the slaves' native spirituality embraced an overlay of Catholicism (to make it seem less suspect) and became known as Vodou. After the slave revolt in the early 1800s, several people (slave owners, ex-slaves, and slaves) moved to New Orleans where the practice morphed into Voodoo the term more commonly known in American pop culture. Of course, pop culture vastly oversimplified and sensationalized Voodoo, looking only to the dark parts of the practice, including rituals to make the dead into mindless slaves. The show then looks at early Hollywood films that were inspired by the descriptions found in William Seabrook and Zora Neale Hurston. The films definitely went in their own directions with the concept. 

The biggest cultural shift was with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead which inspired a new wave of zombie films in the 1970s and 1980s more focused on gore, horror, and (sometimes accidental) social commentary. A later revival happened in the late 1990s with the Resident Evil video games that introduced apocalyptic settings where survivors struggled to exist in a world overrun by zombies created through chemical accidents or other scientific causes (often by sinister companies or rogue elements of governments). Zombies became a staple of pop culture in the new millennium, spawning ongoing stories, comedies, and an endless variety of zombie types, from sympathetic to horrific.

The show starts with an interpretation of zombies as an expression of fears around slavery. The Haitian slaves wanted to preserve their identity. A minor element of West African religious practices is stealing souls from people to use them as mindless workers. The show stays with that interpretation throughout, giving only occasional nods to other ideas (like fear of world-wide diseases). The show ends with a look at Jordan Peele's Get Out as a zombie/slave allegory. The terrible treatment of Africans brought forcibly to the Western hemisphere is important to remember and is a seminal facet of zombie lore.

I felt like the narrow focus on racism became a crippling lens that leaves out other issues and even deeper issues around zombies. Other issues include the fear of a horrible afterlife, the transformation of loved ones into something unrecognizable and horrible (a rotting corpse is bad enough; a reanimated one is worse), and the worry over medical research and weapons research that may get out of control. The deeper issues are the loss of free will and human dignity. The only thing worse than living a life of a slave is having to live it eternally as a mindless corpse. A lot of the early Hollywood films feature someone trying to take over a woman who is otherwise unreachable, denying her free will and the respect she should deserve as a fellow human being. The lack of human dignity works both ways--the zombies treat human as merely food and the humans treat zombies as monsters only to be destroyed (or maybe exploited like a government looking to weaponize zombies or like white liberals seeking immortality in Get Out). While this show is good as far as it goes, there's a lot more that can be said about zombies.

Recommended--even with my want for more, I still learned a lot and enjoyed the show.

I found this on Kanopy but it is also available from PBS's website and on YouTube.