Voodoo Queens and Zombie Lords: Haiti in U.S. Horror Films

Since the success of its Revolution, Haiti has been consistently represented as the boogeyman in American nightmares. The nation’s repeated ability to resist (re-)colonization and rebel against domination has frequently resulted in fictional and filmic representations of Haiti as a place which violently and horrifically disrupts (white) Western authority. And yet, such fictions are never really about Haiti and the supposed threat or “problem” she poses. Rather, they repeatedly represent and engage in debates about how the U.S. might control Haiti. In these fictions, Haiti-as-monster becomes a metaphorical tool to mirror the monstrosity of the U.S. and its previous political maneuvers, a tool to support modern forms of intervention, and a tool which enables philosophical debate on U.S. national identity. In truth, however, Haiti disappears in the very first moment it appears on screen or in text.

Accordingly, my presentation will examine three different films at different moments of U.S. intervention into Haiti to examine how and why the texts make Haiti disappear: White Zombie (1932), Zombies on Broadway (1945), and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986). Each film appeared at a moment in time when U.S. political engagement with Haiti shifted. As such, each film embodies the U.S. socio-political discourse of its era.

Maisha Wester is an associate professor in the African American & African Diaspora Studies Department at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She has contributed chapters to anthologies such as The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic, and the Companion to the American Gothic, while her essays have appeared in journals such as Film International, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Reconstruction. Her primary research interests are African American gothic literature and horror films.