From April 23 to May 3, the 2026 Hot Docs Festival will present documentaries from around the world to audiences in Toronto. 115 films from 51 countries will screen during this year’s Festival. Tickets are on sale now.
George A. Romero’s iconic Night of the Living Dead spearheaded an entire genre that has spawned hundreds of films and TV shows centred around flesh-eating monsters. Before their cinematic deviation, the origins of the reanimated dead can be traced back to 17th-century colonial Caribbean sugarcane fields and are connected to Vodou, a religion in which enslaved West Africans held the belief that death would free them to return to their homeland for their afterlife. If a landowner turned them into a zombie, however, their homeward passage would be interrupted and they would labour in plantations forevermore. Director Maya Annik Bedward explores the damaging ongoing appropriation of the undead figure in popular culture to unpack the mythology and reclaim the zombie’s power as a symbol of survival and resilience. Extensive visual research and interviews with filmmakers, vodou practitioners and anthropologists juxtapose horror-film history with Haitian culture to create a pathway to understand the roots of the zombie in slavery and the spiritual significance of a lost body deprived of its soul. Alexander Rogalski
