Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!
One of the issues with a lot of older movies is that the racism is baked in. With King of the Zombies, the racism isn’t merely baked into the narrative but central to the way the film works. A huge amount of the plot turns on the conventions of Black characters being cowardly and superstitious. It makes this film a difficult watch at times, especially when contrasted with a far more respectful film like I Walked with a Zombie, which came out a couple of years later.
Since this is almost three decades before the seminal George Romero film, you should assume that the zombies in the title are the classical ones, reanimated corpses designed to be servants, created through a magic ritual associated with Voodoo or something similar. What that means is that all of the Black characters in the film are going to be connected to these dark forces in some way, have superstitious beliefs in “haints” and magic potions…and at least some of it is going to be right. Someone much more knowledgeable than I can get into the colonization narrative that is impossible to avoid here; I’m not sure I’m the right guy to do more than point out that it not only exists in the film but is also central to it.
