The go-to film I always talk about is Get Out, because I see Get Out as very much a zombie film. When you talk about that liminal space, I think about the sunken place and how well Jordan Peele represented that. The sunken place is where a lot of us feel we exist in the systems we live under today: in between, not fully free. The legacies of colonialism and imperialism still impact our daily lives in so many ways, and that’s the space we occupy within structures we live in. It’s an interesting metaphor to talk about the structures of power we continue to fight against.
I’ve been working on this film so long that I started working on it before Get Out came out; and when Get Out came out, I was blown away. I was like, “Wow, this film deals with so much that I’m exploring and researching right now. On top of that, it’s a horror film; on top of that, it’s this zombie film. In this context, it might be considered more “body snatcher,” but I think it’s actually more zombie—in terms of the true Haitian zombie, in terms of the themes that it embodies.
The ending of Jordan Peele’s film was originally inspired by Night of the Living Dead, and he changed the ending based on how test audiences reacted to the demise of his main character; they wanted a positive ending, instead of what we see in Night of the Living Dead. I wanted to interview him and look toward the future of what zombie films could be, especially if they’re made by Black filmmakers; unfortunately, I was not able to get an interview with him, so that didn’t work out, but I really hope he sees my film. I would love his notes. [Laughs]
Night of the Living Dead, as you said earlier, finds the zombie straying further from its Haitian and Vodou origins and becoming another type of cultural metaphor, for social upheaval via this mass movement, a horde tearing the societal fabric apart. Dawn of the Dead goes even further with its critiques of mass consumerism, divorcing the zombie even more from those roots.
Night of the Living Dead is a turning point in the zombie narrative; it becomes a flesh-eater, and everything else evolves from that, and it’s very much disassociated from its roots in Vodou and Haiti. But it’s interesting how that film still very much touches on ideas of race, because of the main character of Ben, [played by Duane Jones]. It’s really interesting what this group of indie filmmakers out of Pittsburgh put together, and how it’s found this legacy, all the lore that people have around it.