Washington Square in Philadelphia is a locale steeped in layers of history, memory and contradiction. Few places in America encapsulate the paradoxes of freedom and oppression quite like it. Once a burial ground for American freedmen, abolitionists, enslaved people and soldiers from various wars, the square is a silent witness to centuries of struggle and resilience.
It’s fitting, then, that Washington Square is the setting for a genre-defying entry into the zombie film canon, White Meat, which promises to thrill with its visceral imagery and dark humor, but also invites audiences to confront the deep-seated racial and historical wounds that continue to define America. The film’s premise is as daring as it is deceptively simple: Zombies arise from the burial grounds of Washington Square, but these undead beings exhibit a hunger that is exclusively directed at White people — a manifestation of retributive justice, a reversal of historical oppression, and a symbolic act of payback for the horrors of slavery and systemic racism.
White Meat is still in its nascent stages. The film’s writer, producer and director David Dylan Thomas launched a $60,000 Kickstarter campaign to fund a short film version that will serve as a tool to garner more support for the full-length feature. It has so far raised more than $61,000.
“The movie opens with this visceral image of Black zombies emerging from the grave, and, well, let’s just say their appetite isn’t random,” says Thomas. “They’re out for White people.”
Unsurprisingly, the film’s central conceit has sparked debate amongst Thomas’ friends, family and potential supporters, even at this early stage. Thomas is well aware that many will label the film as an exercise in reverse racism, and may even protest it as a result. Make no mistake about it — that is what it is. But reversing racism in this moment might be just what this country needs.
Although he was careful not to divulge too many details — “I will say there’s a deeper plot afoot and that the type of zombies we’re dealing with is kind of important to the narrative” — he made it clear that the film is both tongue-in-cheek and deliberately provocative.
“It’s not meant to be taken at face value,” he notes, hinting at the layered commentary embedded within every frame.
Washington Square as metaphor itself
Central to White Meat is its setting: Once upon a time, Washington Square was a thriving Black community. Free Africans convened, shopped, and built their communities there, and the area served as a hub for what became known as the Free African Society. This rich tapestry of Black history forms the backbone of his film’s narrative, serving as both a literal and metaphorical excavation of buried legacies.
Washington Square is a microcosm of the city’s broader historical narrative — a space where the legacies of liberation and oppression coexist. From the hidden markers that commemorate the lives of those who were once marginalized, to the architectural and cultural imprints left by generations of residents, the Square remains a potent symbol of both what has been lost and what can be reclaimed. The history of Washington Square is not merely a backdrop for Thomas’s film but a character in its own right — one that embodies the ghosts of the past and the promise of future reckoning.
For Thomas, the seeds of White Meat were sown through personal experience, when he moved to Philly from Baltimore in 2004, when his wife got a job at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Although White Meat will be his first feature-length film, Thomas has released a few web series/short films set in Philadelphia, including a seven-part series on the tech industry called Developing Philly.
“When it happens to White people, it’s horror. When it happens to Black people, it’s history.” — David Dylan Thomas
When he got here, Thomas was immediately struck by the palpable sense of history embedded in the city’s streets. One of the first things he discovered was that enslaved people were buried under Washington Square. “And the way my mind works is immediately I thought, what if they all came back as zombies, but then they just started eating White people?” he muses.
The film’s title, White Meat, is as provocative as its narrative. Thomas admits that the genesis of the title was both spontaneous and deeply symbolic. “It’s one of those things where you know, some things are culturally so old that no one really knows their origins,” he explains. “For me, it was coming from how we think about chicken, how we think about fried chicken, or turkey — there’s white meat and there’s dark meat. So I thought, if it were zombies, there’d be white meat and dark meat, right?”
This metaphor, while humorous on the surface, also brandishes a subversive edge. It underscores the film’s commentary on racial hierarchies and the exoticization of blackness. In Thomas’s vision, the very act of zombies targeting only White people becomes a symbolic inversion — a way to challenge the entrenched power dynamics of racial history. “I’m a stickler about titles,” he added. “I’ve written a lot of stories and movies, and once I hit on White Meat, I knew it was the perfect encapsulation of what I wanted to say.”
For Thomas, the controversy over the film’s premise is a feature, not a bug. It is precisely the audacity that forces audiences to confront uncomfortable truths about America’s racial history and the ways in which society chooses to remember — or forget — its past. Here in the United States of Amnesia we tend to bury our history, and in the current political climate, the push to erase that history has reached some exceptional heights. By reanimating the ghosts of history in such a literal fashion, White Meat may be both a horror film and a historical intervention.
Thomas’s journey to White Meat began long before the film entered production, with inspiration pulled from the genre’s iconic predecessors, such as George A. Romero’s groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. But it all started, Thomas says, with a movie called Horror Noire, a documentary about Black horror.
“I had only recently become a horror fan, and while I was pretty squeamish at first, every now and then I’d watch something,” he says. “Then, after I started working on White Meat, I couldn’t get enough.” This early encounter with a film that dissected the intersection of race and horror ignited a passion in Thomas — a passion that has evolved into a distinctive artistic vision.
The cultural phenomenon ushered in by Jordan Peele’s Get Out further catalyzed Thomas’s creative journey. “Honestly, when I saw Get Out and all the layers it had on top of just being a good scary movie, I was like, oh, I get it. Horror can do all of these other things,” Thomas explains. This realization, combined with his own reflections on films like The Girl with All the Gifts, a lesser-known yet influential work that reimagines the zombie narrative through a Black lens, set the stage for a film that is as much about racial commentary as it is about monsters.
“The Girl with All the Gifts [takes place in] like mid-2000s, 2010s, and the main character is this Black girl in a sort of post-apocalyptic world,” Thomas says. “She and the other children are in this weird position where they can become like zombies, but normally they’re just normal. It’s all about the world around them trying to control them.”
This personal history with black horror films is not merely nostalgic — it is integral to Thomas’s creative process. “Horror is so political,” he emphasizes. “When I saw Horror Noire and started researching for White Meat, it really opened up for me that there is even such a thing as Black horror. It showed me the thread throughout how we’re portrayed in horror, and then what happens when we get the camera and folks like William Crain make things like Blackula. It’s part of a larger story about Black people in cinema and how we portray ourselves.”
By delving into the legacy of black horror, Thomas has positioned White Meat as part of a continuum — a film that not only pays homage to its predecessors but also reinvents the zombie narrative for a new era. In doing so, he challenges the dominant conventions of the genre, urging audiences to see horror not just as entertainment but as a mirror reflecting the complexities of race, history and power.
“Horror gives you the opportunity to play with fear, to explore catharsis in a way you’d never want to touch in real life,” Thomas explains. While the film’s premise might raise eyebrows, it is ultimately an exploration of the transformative power of art. “Art matters, art moves people, art makes people want to go out and protest,” he says, underscoring the belief that creativity and design can be potent forms of activism.
Thomas is well aware of the ways that fear and cultural bias animate the social infrastructure of America. Author of Design for Cognitive Bias, Thomas frequently speaks to organizations about how to leverage our innate biases for good.
Zombies in the African tradition
In researching White Meat, Thomas delved deep into the origins of the zombie myth — a myth that is steeped in African tradition. “What I will say is this,” he says, “in doing research about the history of zombie movies and zombies in general, I learned that the word ‘zombie’ actually comes from Santo Domingue. It was the word that the enslaved people there used.
“It is absolutely Black. It comes through Yoruba, from Western Africa and the religions that were moved over to Haiti — that’s where you get voodoo and the bastardizations of voodoo. One of the ideas is that even if you die, your White master can use magic to bring you back, and then you come back compliant for a while before snapping out of it. And that’s where the whole idea of, Oh, I’m going to kill you, bring you back, and then you’ll be my slave comes from.”
“Horror gives you the opportunity to play with fear, to explore catharsis in a way you’d never want to touch in real life.” — David Dylan Thomas
This historical insight not only enriches the film’s backstory but also serves as a potent reminder of the deep cultural roots that inform modern horror tropes. In reclaiming these origins, Thomas challenges the dominant narratives that have long marginalized black contributions to cinematic mythology.
White Meat is a reminder that cinema can be a transformative force. Thomas envisions a future where films like his are seen not merely as entertainment but as essential commentaries on the human condition. This is the kind of film that will be required viewing for some communities. Much like Get Out or Candyman — it will find its place amongst films that dive deep into the racial complexities of America — White Meat purports to address how the lives and realities of Black people have been eaten alive by forces beyond their control.
The film’s unapologetic stance on these issues is likely to provoke discomfort, but Thomas argues that discomfort is often the precursor to meaningful change. “I don’t think I’m endorsing eating white people literally,” he says with a wry smile. “This is not meant to be taken as an endorsement of violence but as a way to complicate and interrogate that fantasy as the movie unfolds.”
In many ways, White Meat may be more than a film — it is a cultural intervention, a cinematic reckoning with America’s buried past. Through its inventive narrative and its historical reach, the film challenges audiences to see horror not merely as a genre of fright but as a mirror reflecting the painful truths of our collective history.
“There’s a line that I don’t use in the movie,” Thomas says. “But I’ve been thinking about a lot in regards to the film. When it happens to White people, it’s horror. When it happens to Black people, it’s history.”
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