White Zombie (1932)
A Haitian plantation owner asks a voodoo master to help him win an engaged woman's affection, and instead gets her turned into a mindless zombie servant — forcing her fiancé to storm the sorcerer's clifftop fortress to break the spell.
Released a year after Dracula, White Zombie is generally credited as the first feature-length zombie film, and it leans on Bela Lugosi’s hypnotic stare — rather than gore, which the pre-Code era hadn’t yet made a horror staple — to do the frightening.
Background
White Zombie was made by the brothers Victor and Edward Halperin on a low budget, reusing sets and props from Universal’s horror pictures. The story draws on William Seabrook’s 1929 travel book The Magic Island, which introduced Haitian zombie legends to American readers. Bela Lugosi plays “Murder” Legendre, a sugar-mill owner who enslaves workers. The band White Zombie, and Rob Zombie, took their name from the film.
What to watch for
The film has an eerie, dreamlike quality. Lugosi’s stare, the slow, sleepwalking movements of the zombies and the moody photography all work together, and the sound of the sugar mill grinding is memorable. It is worth remembering that it reflects the attitudes of its time towards Haiti, and that the zombie of the movies is a very different creature from the one in the country’s folklore. The film was not a great success on release, but it has since become a cult favourite and an important early step in the development of the zombie film.
