Forced labour even after death

A capitalism-critical reading of the zombie film on the occasion of the release of Zombi Child (2019) by Bertrand Bonello.

Zombies as swaying figures with rotting open wounds and bloo­d­s­tai­ned dis­lo­ca­ted faces aimlessly chasing people have been a familiar film subject to us since George Romero’s “The Night of the Living Dead” in 1968.

In his film “Zombi Child” (France, 2019), which is set in a strict Catholic boarding school for girls in today’s Paris and 1960s Haiti, Bertrand Bonello moves away from this cha­rac­te­ri­sa­ti­on and instead follows on in homage to the first zombie feature film in history, ”White Zombie”. Directed by Viktor Halperin and inde­pendent­ly produced by his brother Edward in 1932, during Hol­ly­woo­d’s short pre-code period, was also set in Haiti and also manifests the form of the undead, a common form of voodoo that ori­gi­na­ted there. Before George Romero coined the genre-typical ‘zombie’, zombies appeared in the form of pon­de­rous­ly moving, will-less and unfeeling, outwardly unscathed corpses.

In both Bonello’s and Halperin’s inter­pre­ta­ti­ons, the zombies robbed of their souls by a zombie master are exploited at night as slaves in the sugar cane plan­ta­ti­ons. Although research suggests that the phe­no­me­non of the zombie did not first develop during the Carib­be­an’s slave trade era, but was actually brought from Africa with the voodoo cult, the original zombie films and also “Zombi Child” allow a reading that shows the same hopeless fate — forced labour even after death.

Nothing could have been more pro­fi­ta­ble for the elites of the European colonial powers than the sugar plan­ta­ti­ons of the Caribbean. The African slaves were the “fuel” of this proto-indus­tri­al economy and after a few years they were “inci­ne­ra­ted”.

Although Romero chose a different formal cine­ma­to­gra­phic language, his zombie films also contains a political subtext. His criticism of American consumer society is quite evident in “Zombie” (1978), where the final fight for humanity took place laughably in a shopping mall. Romero sees the zombies as a revo­lu­tio­na­ry expres­si­on of that sick society.

Bonello’s critique of society is more sub­ver­si­ve­ly embedded in a cliché teenager-in- love story. The girl-clique of the French elite boarding school in “Zombi Child” is fasci­na­ted by the voodoo tradition of their comrade from Haiti. When one of the school­girls takes a stab at voodoo out of love­sick­ness and without malicious intent, in a quasi-colo­nia­list manner, death inva­ria­b­ly occurs. The cultural appro­pria­ti­on of voodoo by a white European woman stands as a metaphor for the explo­ita­ti­on and sub­ju­ga­ti­on of the southern hemisphere.